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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24218011">Not a Grise</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/schwutthing/pseuds/schwutthing'>schwutthing</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Exit [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Animal Metaphors, Backstory, Emotional Baggage, Extended Metaphors, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Javert Lives, Javert and Valjean have a lot of issues, M/M, Madeleine Era, Past Relationship(s), Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Seine, Pre-Toulon-era, Religious Imagery &amp; Symbolism, Slow Burn, Valjean Lives, Valjean does try so hard, a dash of</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 17:08:30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>48,391</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24218011</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/schwutthing/pseuds/schwutthing</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em> For 'tis a vulgar proof that very oft we pity enemies. ~ Twelfth Night, Act 3 Scene 1.  </em>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Javert &amp; Original Character(s), Javert/Jean Valjean</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Exit [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1748014</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>89</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Patience on a monument</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When death came, Valjean went peacefully.</p><p>In Toulon he had always envisioned a violent and bloody end. It was not hard to do so, then, at night, locked with others as miserable as he, and others yet madder. Men muttering and groaning, the newest often wailing; the furtive grunts of those who sought to fulfil their basest needs, the choked ones of those subject unwillingly to them, and the plaintive huffs of those who had the fortune to be willing. But none of those sounds were the worst. No. The worst were the quiet, almost unheard sobs of worn chords that struck within Valjean, that reminded him of who he had been those first few nights, the knell of heated irons which had long gone cold now refreshed in his head, and death hanging about his neck like a millstone.</p><p>The reminder, always, then, that he had not been so impassive, once, that there were many kinds of death, and that there was a part of him still alive, that could hurt and bleed and die again.</p><p>Not so, this death. This death was gentle. Fantine leading him from his chair, the cries of his little Cosette— Cosette who had returned to him, fading away like ripples in a pond. There was peace, there was hope, and above all, this death was not one alone and unloved, both within the living and beyond.</p><p>The Bishop appeared again, with the same kindly face and outstretched hand, smiling now in this new life. As Valjean approached Bishop Myriel, another wave of relief cascaded over him, and he breathed with cleansed lungs. A warm hand clasped his arm, another looped round his back, and Myriel was guiding him, leading through a room full of the calm warmth of candles. They did not speak. This was and was not the convent. The convent, for all its light, had been cold, and there were never quite so many candles.</p><p>Valjean thought to brush his hands past the walls to see if they would dissipate at a touch like air, but had no chance to do so. Myriel was singular in his course, shepherding him past the thick wooden doors and into the light mist beyond.</p><p>Then dusk, and dawn, and day break.</p><p>The songs of the hopeful floated up to his ears, and Valjean walked on, no longer in the Bishop’s grasp. He followed the trail of voices, and found himself in a stream of people walking on and forwards, like him. The stream turned into a swell, burst forth into the square where months before Lamarque’s hearse had driven by. But oh, what a square! What things were in it! A barricade that cascaded upwards in the square, past the tops of the broken Elephant, past the second storey windows of the buildings around it, inching mid-way up the third storey panes. And people. There were so many. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Not the pitiful band he recalled that night not so long ago. The downtrodden, the poor. The <em>students</em>. That boy with the wine bottle. That lad, the leader, his blonde locks lifted serene in the air, his eyes without fear or sadness. The child, Gavroche, emerging from the Elephant, grin stretching his cheeks, flag in hand, no longer the limpid corpse he had laid in the back of the tavern. As if his fall had merely been to a long nap, now he cheered, refreshed. And the others. Valjean had heard their cries as he dragged the boy Marius through the barricades and into the alley beyond. He had heard the gunshots, and now he wept with sung joy to see them once again, proud, and strong, and young.</p><p>They would live again, in freedom.</p><p>And there was Fantine. And there was he himself, climbed to the top of that glorious barricade, to the light, and all was well. His tears dried.</p><p>But the Bishop had not climbed up with him, and soon Valjean felt a tug through his spine, and he turned from the joyous, fierce scene, first to look at Fantine, then beyond her below. It was the Bishop indeed, standing serene amongst the push of people climbing towards the top of the barricade. The Bishop graced him with a smile, wisdom crinkling in his eyes.</p><p>Valjean found himself climbing down from his post. It was easier to move against the flow of bodies than he would have thought.</p><p>“Father,” he said, on reaching Myriel.</p><p>“We are all brothers here, now,” said Myriel.</p><p>Valjean shook his head, smiling. “You called me brother, even then.”</p><p>“Did I?” said Myriel, eyes twinkling like stars on a still lake. “I must have wished myself already out of that earthly plane.” Valjean thought to mention that he had assumed the same when they had met, so many years ago, but all he could manage was a choked nod. Then the lake in Myriel’s eyes shook slightly. Valjean saw, but did not comprehend. Instead, he gestured to the Paris about them.</p><p>“What is this?” Valjean asked.</p><p>“Ah, this,” said the Bishop, and his eyes seemed to deepen. “This is a vision of hope, Jean Valjean.” Valjean did not wonder at the Bishop knowing his name, though it had not been asked of him when they had met in life. The air seemed open here. It was not a place of secrets.</p><p>“Is this paradise?”</p><p>“Does it seem paradise to you?” the voice was warm, and the question not unkindly asked. Valjean found that he did not know, and said as much. Myriel’s reply was a smile.</p><p>“But you say, a vision, Father?” asked Valjean, then looked about him, and spoke slowly. “I see happiness in people I have known, who have passed from the earth, and more amongst them,” Valjean said. As he did so, his eyes caught Fantine’s on the parapet. She smiled, tender and soft. Her eyes lowered shut, then she curtsied slightly, and turned away to look beyond the barricade. Valjean watched on. “As for myself, I—but I am at peace.” His tone was less sure than he hoped it would be. There was something missing.</p><p>Someone. Perhaps. Before Valjean could complete that thought, the Bishop’s eyes found his again, and he was locked in that sombre, serene gaze.</p><p>Myriel lifted a hand to Valjean’s forehead in benediction. “Brother,” he said. “Brother, close your eyes.” Valjean blinked, but the press of a thumb on his brow caused him to bow his head. The ground beneath him rumbled, and fled away, and opened up to white. Valjean's eyes shut.</p><p>“Take hope and love with you anew, Valjean,” he heard the Bishop say, before the air slammed Valjean to floor.</p><p>He was choking, heaving madly against a mist which strangled him and tore at his chest and face. He reached out to grab at stinging shards of black, hands clawed, unseeing. Wind, hot and rotten roared at his nostrils, filling him, pouring into him. This was not hope, he thought, this was despair. But the Bishop’s voice came again in his ear. Take hope. And Valjean pressed his hands to his chest, doubled over, and breathed in the rot, and breathed it out as if he could dilute it, filter it. His lungs burned, sweat poured down his forehead, and his eyes clenched shut as the air spun and him with it. Take hope. Take hope. In a space where there was none. He was on his knees, he was being ground into chips of marrow and flesh. This was death. This was the death of his fears. He tried to cry out. He could not. He burrowed further in on himself. Take hope. Take love. The air turned to silt, and tipped, and Valjean could no longer even kneel, felt himself slipping further down a slope. A crowbar pried at his teeth, reaching in, forcing his mouth open to the onslaught of terrible nothing.</p><p>Valjean screamed.  </p><p>The sound which issued from his lips, however, was a weak moan, trapped behind locked, dry lips.</p><p>“He awakes,” a voice, male, said. It sounded very far away.</p><p>Valjean groaned, and tried to open his eyes, but his lids seemed stuck fast. It was as if a slimed film covered his whole face, and he worked to breathe. He heard the running of light feet, a rustle, and a cool palm was placed on his forehead. This was followed by a damp cloth that wiped carefully at his brow and about his lids, then followed those creases till they finished on his chin. The cloth was removed. With effort, as though shifting boulders, Valjean managed to lift his lids to allow a fraction of light to enter. It flooded him, and Valjean winced against the barrage, vision swimming.</p><p>He tried to speak again. He did not manage it.</p><p>“Papa,” he heard, and knew it was Cosette, even as colours muddied in front of him and no forms appeared. More footsteps, the sudden coldness of a circle pressed at his chest. A doctor’s instrument, he realised. A stethoscope. Yes. Someone was moaning weakly. He realised it was himself. His tongue felt thick and furred in his throat. He stopped trying to speak; tried to sigh instead. It came out a croak.</p><p>“Water,” he heard Cosette say. “There. Hurry, please.” The sound of liquid splashing into a cup, then that same cup was nudging his lips, and a slim hand reached behind to cradle his head. Valjean sipped tentatively, letting the water soak past his teeth and unstick his cheeks. He breathed, and drank a little more. As he did, Cosette’s outline solidified. Valjean blinked, and blinked again, wondering at Cosette’s gentle face as it came into further focus each time he reopened his eyes.</p><p>“My child,” he said when he could, lips still papery. Cosette smiled sweetly, but her face was steeped in concern. She set the cup aside. “You are here,” said Valjean. Cosette nodded, and clasped his arm. He looked around, saw bare walls and an empty bed across from him, the frame simple and unadorned. Light cast from behind him, bright and cold at the same time. It seemed late morning. He looked down at himself, and saw plain white sheets, dented and crumpled into the spaces his body was not. Distantly it reminded him of winter, and he thought of a little girl wandering barefoot on snow. He looked up at Cosette again, perhaps to reassure himself that she was no longer that girl. And indeed, she was not, but neither was she dressed in white as she had been when he had last seen her. Before he— before he had died. Valjean swallowed as the image of a towering barricade flashed past his mind. He drew another breath.</p><p>“Where is here?” he asked.</p><p>“The Hôtel-Dieu,” a voice said from a few beds away, and when Valjean turned to the source, a man stood there. A doctor, Valjean guessed. He was replacing an instrument of some sort on a stand near the door. A younger man stood with him. The doctor bent and murmured something to him. The young man nodded, and left the ward. The doctor turned back to Valjean.</p><p>“You have been unconscious three days, monsieur,” he intoned, stepping towards Valjean again. It must have been he who had placed the stethoscope on him earlier, Valjean thought. The doctor took up Valjean’s wrist, and felt his pulse, as if to corroborate what he had observed not five minutes earlier. He peered closely at Valjean’s face. Valjean blinked. “We had thought you quite dead.”</p><p>Well, thought Valjean, that made two of them.</p><p>“But how am I–”</p><p>“Here?” asked the doctor, and here he coughed, bristling slightly. “It is a miracle. Only by foresight of your daughter are you alive.” Valjean felt pained gratitude rising within him, and reached for Cosette’s hand even as he blinked away any threat of tears.</p><p>“Indeed, she caused quite the commotion,” continued the good doctor as he began a more thorough inspection. “The nuns were in a fright at the lady, gowned in white, bursting through the hospital doors. You understand, we do not usually have brides suddenly making demands for their father to be seen. Unless, of course, it is one of those collapses caused by too much drinking and dancing at the feast, and even then, they ask for doctors to come with them.” The doctor’s tone was measured, with a shade of humour rounding his words. He coughed again, and paused, the effect of which only became clear when his eyes met Valjean’s the same time as he said, “Then rushed in her knight in shining armour behind her –mind— cradling an old man to his chest as if he were a child.”</p><p>Valjean choked, and tried to raise himself from the pillows. Cosette cast the doctor a look of mock disapproval, and the doctor inclined his head slightly, then murmured, “As I said, madame, it is not every day.” But it was clear that the two had reached some sort of concord in the past few days.</p><p>“I am surprised the bride is not more upset,” said the doctor. “Her honeymoon has after all been denied her. And you have denied Dupuytren his chance at draining your brain.” Valjean paled slightly at the words. “He wished for seizure,” continued the doctor seriously. Cosette tutted, and smiled, and stroked Valjean’s forehead. She turned to the doctor.</p><p>“Thank you, monsieur,” she said. The doctor inclined his head again, marked something on a pad of paper, and folded his hands.</p><p>“Pierre will arrive shortly with the broth. It would be good if your father could consume some,” said the doctor, and left.</p><p>“They were afraid it was cholera,” said Cosette softly when the doctor had left. “M. Trousseau,” she said, nodding to the door where the doctor had passed through before, “thought you would not survive the night. Your eyes were so sunken, he said—” Cosette broke off, having to pause. Tears were pricking her cheeks.</p><p>“I am sorry,” said Valjean.</p><p>“No, Papa, no,” said Cosette, smiling, though now her cheeks were wet. “You did not know how glad we were when your lips did not turn blue.” The absurdity of her simple statement seemed to register on her face, and she gave a small laugh. It lifted Valjean’s spirits. She clasped Valjean’s hand, tighter now, and bent to kiss his fingers. Her face turned serious. “There was no time to call a doctor.”</p><p>“Yes, so you had to bring me to one,” completed Valjean. “My clever little lark.” He reached up and touched a finger to her cheek. Cosette caught it, and held it.</p><p>“It was too dangerous to move you as well, and so I asked for a bed. Marius stayed the first night.”</p><p>Ah.</p><p>“It seems the boy has repaid me tenfold,” said Valjean, his throat constricting suddenly. “You will keep each other well,” he said, looking again at Cosette, no longer Fauchelevent, now Pontmercy. Cosette’s face seemed to war with herself, lips trembling, but smiling, brows drawn but open all at once.</p><p>“I stayed the next night. We read your letter together, Papa.”</p><p>Ah. Valjean had forgot. Now, Cosette’s tears flowed freely, and Valjean made a movement to wipe them away, but found his hands caught in hers.</p><p>“Why did you think it would be a disgrace, Papa?” came the voice of his Cosette, so small, yet so much stronger than he felt. She dried her eyes. “I love you now the more for it. And why did you go away? Do not do so again. When you are well you must return home. I will inform Mme. Toussaint. First, she is distressed at your disappearance. Then, she does not get on with Nicolette. It is good that we are returning to Rue Plumet. I have insisted on it. Marius agrees with me.”</p><p>Cosette chattered on now. “Toussaint will feel better there. You must come. <em>You</em> would feel better there.” At this her breath hitched. “Papa, how did you waste away in three weeks? Why did you think you had to leave?” Some of her tears dotted the sheets. She wiped at her eyes hurriedly.</p><p>“Do not cry,” said Valjean, but his own voice was wet. The assistant named Pierre returned, broth in hand, and at his presence Valjean found it in him to compose himself.</p><p>“I will take it,” said Cosette. Pierre seemed young. He looked at Valjean, then beyond him, further into the room.</p><p>“It is good it is not cholera,” he said. He nodded past Valjean’s head, and Valjean turned, following his line of vision. There was an occupant in the bed beside him that Valjean had not previously noticed, whose head was firmly lodged in the dent of a pillow. What could be seen of his hair fell in short, jagged waves, and he was turned mostly away from present company, the rise and fall of his chest indicating sleep.</p><p>“He showed signs of cholera, a week and a half after they brought him in.” Pierre shook his head. “He survived. Apparently, survived the rebellion too. This was the reason he had been brought in, I hear. They say he was involved in the fight, but his guardian would say little more. A younger man. Could be his brother, or cousin.”</p><p>“You have cared for him?” asked Cosette, her natural curiosity sparked. She looked at Valjean. “He has barely stirred the whole time I have sat by you,” she whispered loudly to Valjean, as if believing it would go unheard. Valjean could not help but smile. Pierre shook his head.</p><p>“No madame. Another student. My friend died. This one lived.” He bowed. “Forgive me. I am glad he is saved,” and despite the darkening of the boy’s brow, his words were genuine. “They tried the saline infusion. It worked. Also, the man has great instinct for living. His first words were for water, and he did not stop drinking, even while delirious.”</p><p>Valjean contemplated the bulk hidden in the bed beside him. Was this shame he felt? That he, healthy, though having thought he lost Cosette, had given up his life so easily, had found this earthly home without Cosette as good as death itself? Now he considered this man, who had emerged from the wreckage of the rebellion. The stink of shit and blood echoed in Valjean’s nostrils again. He remembered that night, though it had been months—</p><p>A thought struck him.</p><p>“But you say he was at the barricades?” asked Valjean. “That was surely almost two months ago?”</p><p>“Quite, monsieur,” Pierre nodded. “But he was badly injured. Not every casualty that day was the result of gunfire. The city was wild that night.”</p><p>“Yes,” said Valjean distantly, then bent his mouth to the spoon that had appeared in front of it. He cast a glance at Cosette, who held the spoon, and she returned his look with playful severity. As he sipped at the broth, Pierre continued to speak, as if he had hitherto been unable to relate this catalogued information. Perhaps that was indeed so.</p><p>“The cholera weakened him, if he was not already gone. Drowned, they said. Either fell in the sewers or the river (I cannot recall now). Or was thrown. Cracked ribs, Broken legs. He fell into a great fever shortly after the cholera. It only broke two days ago.” Pierre shook his head. “And he has slept since.” Pierre’s chin drooped. “It is a miracle.”</p><p>Valjean lifted his head. “You only wish your friend had had the same,” he said, kindly.</p><p>“Yes,” said Pierre. “No one deserves to die like that. This plague. And still they find no set cure.” He looked at the bed beyond. “No one deserves to die like this,” he repeated. “No one.” He took his leave.</p><p>“This place is a confessional,” whispered Cosette, half-conspiratorial, half in wonder. Valjean could not help but release a short huff of laughter. It threatened to descend into a coughing fit, and Cosette raised him quickly up. He stopped wheezing.</p><p>“You should not make me laugh, Cosette,” he said through crinkled and damp eyes. Cosette fussed, and wiped at his face with her handkerchief, then helped lower him again. “Ah, Cosette. But where is Marius?”</p><p>“At Rue Plumet,” answered Cosette dutifully. “We are making preparations. It will be a lonely garden no more. You must come see it.” Valjean smiled in reply.</p><p>“Go to him,” said Valjean. But Cosette shook her head.</p><p>“How can I, Papa, when you have only just awoken? I shall stay, and speak with you, and—” her words were cut off by a yawn. Valjean smiled wider still. His face gentled.</p><p>“You are tired. You have kept watch all this time. Now there is no danger,” he said, and gestured at himself. “Tomorrow, I shall be better. We shall have many things to tell each other then.” The effort to speak seemed too much for him too, and his tongue fell dumb and heavy against his teeth. He nodded at Cosette one more time, letting his eyes close halfway. Cosette kissed his forehead, and slowly left his side, both of them warmed by the knowledge that this parting would not be forever.</p><p>Valjean lay in a half doze the next few hours. Nuns and medical students walked in and out. Once, M. Trousseau reappeared, muttering to himself, but he seemed to take in Valjean’s countenance in his stride. Footsteps indicated that he was also checking Valjean’s neighbour. The mutterings took another tone. A hoarse voice, not the doctor’s, floated from the bed. Valjean opened his eyes, taking in the flaking paint of the ceiling above him, taking in the murmur of voices. He turned towards the other bed, but the doctor’s form blocked the face of the patient. Valjean took in the rest of the room. It seemed only he and this other were the sole occupants.</p><p>The doctor departed once more in a rustle of clothes and papers. Valjean was left hearing the breathing of both himself and his neighbour. He turned his head on his pillow. The other man still faced away from him, but now he puffed at his fringe as if annoyed by its length. The strands flew into the air and settled away to the side of his forehead, touching the end of his brows. Some strands returned to where they had been before. The man made another sound of irritation, and blew at the hair again. Valjean, bemused, let out a huff of his own.</p><p>The man heard, and turned his head towards Valjean. His fringe fell all over his brows again, covering some of his eyes. Unshaven, though someone had thought to clip his beard, his face was framed such that his eyes were almost hidden by hair and brow. Almost. Valjean knew the face opposite him. He had seen it last, when those eyes were wide, those nostrils flared and that jaw shaking with barely concealed, impotent rage. The hair had been cropped short then, the eyes brighter than they were now.  Still, the man was unmistakable.</p><p>Valjean’s tongue stuck fast to the roof of his mouth. He could not speak the name. Valjean made to exhale, but his breath caught in an unrelenting vice.</p><p>Javert.</p><p>It was Javert, whose eyes had haunted his nights.</p><p>Javert, who had lain here, it seemed, while Marius had lain at his grandfather’s, healing faster in love than the policeman had in isolation. And still Javert survived.</p><p>Javert, who had pursued him, who he had pursued in turn, though briefly, in a time that was dead and gone.</p><p>Javert, who he had thought to claim, once, suddenly; who was just as suddenly lost, as quick as an early exit of autumn.</p><p>Javert.</p><p>He still could not say the name. </p><p>For his part, Javert’s eyes flicked over Valjean’s face. Grey irises locked onto Valjean’s hazel ones. Javert’s eyes neither widened nor narrowed, and he did not look like he could be bothered to be surprised. The only expression that floated to his face was annoyance.</p><p>“<em>Toi</em>,” said Javert, laying the word out as if it were a slab of stone. He rolled his eyes, and leaned back into his pillow, looking at the ceiling. His voice rasped with his next words. “Of course.” His mouth sneered at the space above him, clear enough for Valjean to see.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. A fiend like thee</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He needed a haircut. This was his first lucid thought in days. As the doctor spoke to him, as he rasped out some suitable response, the main thought running through his mind was that he needed a haircut. This was what he thought at he blew at the unruly strands of his fringe which fell over his forehead, and heard the echoing puff of his neighbour beside him. He had at some point in the past few weeks understood that he was in a hospital. As he turned his head he took in the iron bedsteads about him, and his fringe fell over his eyes again as he stared through it at the occupant of the bed beside his.</p><p>The man in the bed beside him was old. Javert stared further, trying to decide if the wave of hair in front of him was skewing his vision. He needed a haircut. But this thought was quickly replaced by <em>You</em>. His eyes darted over wrinkles and sunken cheeks, but once his glance danced over those other eyes, his gaze stilled. He did not even have to blink to be sure. Yes. The man across him was old, his face once again changed, beyond recognition as it so often was, but it was most certainly Jean Valjean.</p><p>He knew those eyes.</p><p>Of course.</p><p><em>You</em>. It would be him. For a fleeting moment Javert mused if he might in fact be in hell. But no, his body had quite stubbornly clung to life, had quite cowardly refused to meet death. Had failed, rather. And so he had lived. Instinct, the doctor had called it. His lip curled both at that thought and Valjean’s presence. The tips of his hair stung at his eyelids. He looked at the ceiling.</p><p>He needed a haircut.</p><p>And some water would not be amiss. He licked his lips. He had given up air in the Seine, yes, he had known that much when he had awakened with impossible thirst and drunk ten times what they must have expelled from him. Then his forehead had burned, and time had slipped away again, but even that, he knew not to be hell. Now this, this cold bright room, was certainly not hell either.</p><p>Besides, he doubted now if Valjean would ever appear in hell.</p><p>Something like laughter threatened to claw through his chest. “No, no of course not, monsieur,” he grated out, “I should use <em>vous</em>. Yes.”</p><p>Valjean was mercifully silent. Javert looked again at him, this time not bothering to turn his head. He looked much the way Javert felt: drowned then half-wrung. He did <em>not</em> look like he had ever borne a man through the sewers. Much the same way that Jean the Jack had not looked like a weeping man from Faverolles. Nor had the man in a soldier’s jacket at the barricades, more weight on him, moving freer, looked at first glance anything like the careful mayor. Nor had Madeleine looked like a convict from Toulon. Except perhaps once. Or twice.</p><p>Madeleine.</p><p>It had been many years since he had spoken the name.</p><p>But that man was dead.</p><p>He looked again at Valjean’s face, with his red-rimmed eyes, no longer wide and now with a weariness to them. An oldness. Yes, none of Madeleine. Not even when the man made as if to pass a hand across his face and murmured a soft, “You.”</p><p>Javert’s hand had crept to his own face, an odd mimic to the man across from him. His fingers found his beard instead, thicker than he usually kept it. The doctor had said he had been here almost two months. This was not the growth of that. He could not remember within the moments of delirium who had cut it.</p><p>The notion that someone had brought a razor that close to his skin without his knowledge galled him. He fingered the beard, but his ribs seemed to protest further movement from his hands, and he let his arm fall to his chest. Weakness, just of the muscles, for there was no sharp pain. He had lain long enough for them to heal.</p><p>Valjean was still staring at him, his jaw working. Javert’s jowl clenched in answer.</p><p>“I did not think—I would not have thought to find you here,” Valjean said. “How came you—”</p><p>Javert did not let him finish.</p><p>“Do I know you, monsieur?” Javert asked, trying to keep the tone he used with ones such as Babet and Montparnasse. But he could not account for the way his tongue refused to let the words through cleanly. His whole body was in rebellion after all, as if it were a stranger to avoid and disobey him. The man across him was a stranger. A strange new Valjean.</p><p>“I think, no,” said Javert. He let his hair fall further over his eyes. The fringe obscured his view.</p><p>He needed a haircut, but for now, this was a small mercy.</p><p>A nurse appeared at the doorway with some broth before either man could speak again. The nurse approached, and Javert’s eyes slid from Valjean. Yes, he nodded at the nurse, he would take the broth. He heard the other man shift. As Javert drunk, he and death having given up on each other, he let his fringe fall further yet. Yes, it was mercy, a small, twisted mercy, for now with sight dimmed, he could hear, magnified, Valjean’s quiet breathing, and the occasional sigh.</p><p>It made an itch form in his mind.</p><p>The nurse retreated after bustling about the ward and collecting his bowl. Javert lowered his head back to the pillow as she left. Valjean watched as the other man’s jaw tightened, the shine of Javert’s beard shifting against muscle. Javert did not turn to look at him. His breathing was even, almost too even, thought Valjean, whose own breaths came to match Javert’s as he watched.</p><p>The air passed through Valjean’s lungs too slowly. It was a prolonged suffocation Valjean had to fight against, or risk the release of a desperate gasp. Javert seemed to feel no such discomfort. An age passed.</p><p>“If you would stop looking.”</p><p>The voice sounded so quietly that Valjean barely caught it. As a faded echo it spread across the back of his skull. The words pulsed, then rushed out through his nostrils. Their breaths were no longer in time, and Valjean was aware of how harsh his now sounded. He had not stopped looking at Javert, had not altered his gaze except to rest it on Javert’s chest, so he knew the ragged breaths were his own.</p><p>Javert shifted in his bed. His legs were in splints, and he flexed his toes tentatively against the bedspread. Two months the following week, the doctor, M. Trousseau had said, he had lain here. There was pain in both his shins, but it was dull and acceptable. He rolled his heels tentatively to the sides and back from where they rested on the bed, trying to relieve some of the pressure in his ankles that he was steadily growing aware of. The splints made this shuffling uncomfortable.</p><p>The rawness in his throat was gone. No longer was there that unbearable thirst. He had coughed up half the Seine. This much he knew. Had coughed up death-giving water and instead of nothing he had felt pain. At first, he had welcomed it, had thought it appropriate punishment. His legs had been weighted by burning steel, and his mouth choked on sand as a pale void stared back at him. Then the water came, a gentle water without the sounds of the Seine rapids, cool but un-quenching and still he had craved more.</p><p><em>I thirst</em>. And they had given him water.</p><p>And he had clung to it, almost revelled in the never-ending thirst emboldened by the cool liquid which passed from his lips till even that faded and was replaced with a scalding of his pores and pools of sweat which boiled against his skin.</p><p>But even that seemed bearable, unlike the burden of the two eyes currently trained on him. The last he had seen them, the surrounding flesh had been blackened by shadow and sewage. They had only burned the brighter for it; only illuminated the dirt within Javert the more. </p><p>The stench from Valjean the escaped convict, the parole breaker, the false Madeleine, it rolled in his gut even now. For the stench was not Valjean’s, was not the sewers', but Javert's and his failure.</p><p>Yes. His failure. The word turned almost effortlessly in his mind now.</p><p>He would not attempt to fail so again.</p><p>With this thought he closed his eyes, and attempted sleep. It did not come, could not, not with Valjean beside him. Five minutes passed, then ten, then he heard the church bell toll the hour. He tried to shift in his bed, but his torso, unused to the movement, protested. Javert let himself sigh. He opened his eyes. The ceiling, the pale void of his fevers, stared back at him. He could discern cracks branching over his head as he studied it.</p><p>“I will not arrest you,” he said, though Valjean’s breaths had quietened now. He was not sure what made him say it, but as with many of his thoughts through the weeks, or even the past hour, it had arrived unbidden.</p><p>Distantly, he heard Valjean swallow.</p><p>“That is not—I was not—that is to say,” started Valjean.</p><p>“And now I am tired. Leave me be,” said Javert before Valjean could continue. He could not see Valjean’s frown but didn’t doubt its existence. A mix of the convict’s empty glare and the man at the barricade’s stunned frown, perhaps? Or perhaps it was a melding of the urgent, drawn brows when Valjean approached with a knife (again, the barricade), and the wary creases around the mouth Madeleine had when—</p><p>He closed his eyes again.</p><p>This time he slept, and did not rouse when the Notre-Dame rang the evening’s Angelus.</p><p>It was a dreamless sleep, and not long enough. When Javert awoke it was dark, though a faint light flickered from beyond the doorway. He shifted, angling to look towards Valjean’s bed. The other man was still, probably asleep. Good. Javert eased himself up slowly. His hands pressed against the mattress, and other muscles protested, but over the course of a minute he managed to straighten and lock his elbows in place.</p><p>He folded one arm across his lap and pushing on the other, sat not quite upright on the bed. The night air was chill, a balm he breathed in deep and did not quite trust. He shuffled back so that the base of his spine rested against the pillows, torso still bent forward as he considered the ward from this new height.</p><p>One of the better, more private wards. There were curtains at the sides of his bed, and Valjean’s, though currently open. He was certainly not sharing two to a miserable cot in such wards that he knew the hospital had. The cost of being warded in this place, it would be three francs a night, at least, surely. But he did not ponder who had brought him here or managed his expenses. There would be time for that in the morning. The doctor had mentioned a name, but it had slipped Javert’s mind.</p><p>His eyes picked out the bedsteads, washstands and chairs in the room. He squinted at the bed opposite him and narrowed his gaze to the gloom underneath its frame, seeking a shape. Yes. Near the edge, not pushed too far in, and about a third up from the foot of the bed. Its position would be mirrored under his own bed, surely.   </p><p>He rested on an elbow and leaned over the side of the bed till he could see underneath it. Chest leaning on his forearm, he craned his head. When he did not spot what he wanted, a grunt of bemusement escaped him. Of course. No, not a mirroring. And it <em>would </em>be on the side closer to Valjean. There was a joke in this, somewhere, he was sure. He sat up again, and looked at Valjean’s prone form. No matter.</p><p>Javert inched his legs off the bed, wincing when his heels thudded on the floor. His eyes shot to Valjean again, but the man still breathed as if asleep. Nevertheless, his calves tensed against the splints. He eased back a bit, trying to keep more weight on his thighs even as he rocked forwards to reach under the bed. His fingers fumbled, met heavy ceramic, but it was too far away to grip, and too near not to push further away. He felt sweat on his temple.</p><p><em>Merde</em>.</p><p>The chamber pot slid out of reach. He leaned forwards more, and grasped again, this time with more force, and this time the chamber pot skittered away to the foot of the bed, hitting the post.</p><p>The clang sounded through the room, and Javert winced again. He took a breath, and gripped the edge of the bedframe, prepared to try a third time. No. It was not a possibility. It <em>was </em>too far away, now. Javert’s wrist went limp. He brought his head back from its strained angle. His hand moved to ease the tension in his neck, but it paused midway. His back was still bowed, but he felt his shoulders cave in further.</p><p>Instinct, the doctor said. Javert ran by instinct, was alive because of it. Self-preservation was a <em>grand</em> instinct.</p><p>Valjean was awake, and was watching him. Instinct snarled itself on Javert’s neck. He wet his lips.</p><p>Valjean made to rise, but Javert’s look stopped him.</p><p>“What are you doing?” Valjean asked. His voice sounded louder than he had thought it would, and he shut his mouth with a click.</p><p>Javert's chin jerked, and he let out a hoarse sound, not quite a laugh. He gestured towards the foot of his bed. Valjean followed the motion of Javert’s hand, till he saw. Ah. It was the cause of the sound which had roused him from his sleep. Then he heard Javert shuffle forward, and his eyes snapped back to the man. He saw now the legs encased in splints and wraps, and the tops of bandages appearing above the V of Javert’s shirt. Knowledge of the man’s injuries was one thing. Seeing them no longer covered by the blanket was something else.</p><p>He still did not know why Javert had met with such misfortune. He had had a gun, after all, on the night of the barricades. Something fluttered in Valjean’s chest, and he pressed his hand to it. Javert was moving, the line of his back a curved, tense thing. Valjean could see faint drops of sweat covering Javert’s forehead.</p><p>“What are you doing?” he asked a second time. Javert merely carried on, eyes intent on the floor. Javert’s thighs flexed, and Valjean watched as the cloth of his nightshirt moved with them. Surely he was not preparing to stand?</p><p>“Don’t,” said Javert, and Valjean realised the man was looking at him. A cloud must have moved outside, for moonlight now streamed through the window, lighting the half-sneer on Javert’s face.</p><p>“You look like a man half dead,” muttered Javert. Valjean could not be sure if man looked like he was stifling laughter or a retch. The man’s lip curled again. “I don’t want to have to explain your corpse to the doctor.”   </p><p>“You look like a man in death throes,” said Valjean. “I will retrieve the pot for you.”</p><p>“No,” said Javert, and Valjean’s fingers paused from where they had been pushing off his blanket. The toss of Javert’s head was minute and marred by the shaking of his limbs.  Valjean heard a low “where are crutches when you need them” just as Javert pushed himself off the bed, and stood, one arm held out for balance. An empty smile of victory flashed across Javert’s lips.</p><p>Then he crumpled forward.</p><p>A crack like gunfire as knees hit wood, a grunt of pain knocked through clenched teeth. Javert fell by Valjean’s bed, arm smacking against its side. Valjean shuddered with the bed frame, and he heard an echoed gasp from below him. Valjean's hands had shot out automatically, but all they had managed to grip at was the night air, and now could not even hold the faint moonlight which dipped between his fingers. On the mattress lay Javert's right hand, flattening just beside Valjean's thigh. The man was already trying to place his weight under his feet again. A new wave of exhaustion swept over Valjean at the sound. It tightened about his ribs, squeezing out a sigh.</p><p>The scrabbling noises abruptly cut.</p><p>“Let go,” Valjean heard. He looked down, and realised Javert’s hand, the one that had landed on the mattress, was clutched in one of Valjean’s own. Javert tugged at it. Starting, Valjean tried to loosen his fingers, but they gripped tighter instead.</p><p>“Let go,” Javert repeated. “I said, let me go.”</p><p>“I cannot,” murmured Valjean. From where his hand encircled Javert’s wrist, he felt muscles push against him as the other man tugged again. Still his fingers would not loosen. Now, under his palm’s edge, the bones in the back of Javert’s hand raised and tensed. Javert was gripping the sheets, crushing the cloth, pushing against the mattress.</p><p>“Let me,” said Valjean. Javert’s answering laughter was a short bark. Valjean could see where his shirt stuck to his back, already sticky with perspiration. The tremors in the line of Javert’s back seemed matched by Valjean’s pulse.</p><p>“Let me,” intoned Javert, “Go.” Both hands were now on the mattress as Javert heaved himself up, shaking from the effort. Valjean felt it in the bed, in his hand, and still did not let go. Javert’s torso half-leaned on the bed, and his breath landed on Valjean’s arm. His eyes were hid.</p><p>“You fell,” said Valjean, as if it were not apparent. Javert seemed only to half hear him, for in reply the man muttered, half to himself, half to Valjean’s arm.</p><p>“Yes, yes, of course I fell. I would fall. I have fallen, I fell.” Javert’s head raised and dipped in small twitches with each word. After this his words became voiceless, lips moving without sound. The lips paused, parted, and once again Valjean felt only breath and the hand beneath his.</p><p>“Your hand grows cold,” said Valjean, though it was not Javert who shivered, but Valjean. He did not know why he spoke; he only knew he felt compelled to. The sudden words caused yet another twitch, this time in Javert’s shoulders. But it was true. Though the pulse ran steady, the skin about the wrist was icy, and Valjean’s hand was fevered in comparison.</p><p>A pause. Javert’s mouth worked. Then, “Monsieur.” The address too, was spoken coldly, and it was this more than anything which broke the spell on Valjean’s fingers. They spasmed, then turned lax. Javert rose, swaying, then steadied as he tilted more weight on his right leg. His shadowed face looked down at Valjean.</p><p>“And now, if you would kindly,” said Javert, twisting his wrist out of Valjean’s now slack hold. “Monsieur.”</p><p>Valjean withdrew his fingers, placing them back on the covers. Javert hobbled backwards, shoulders hunched, feet shuffling. This time he did not fall. Nonetheless as he sat it was with a dull thump that caused Valjean’s face to pinch. Ceramic scraped over floorboards, then stopped.</p><p>“Monsieur,” again, so evenly said, yet so pointed a word which pricked at Valjean’s throat. “If you would, please.” Javert raised his palm in reference to Valjean’s gaze. Of course.</p><p>“Thank you, monsieur.”</p><p>Politeness should not lance so, but it did, and the sting did not fade even as he turned away and did not turn back when the sounds of Javert relieving himself had ceased. Neither did he turn back when the whisper of sheets and creaking bedstead stopped.</p><p>The moonlight was cold as it cast across the empty beds further down the ward, as it fought with the dim warmth in the corridors, like snow unjustly banking a match’s flame. Valjean’s fingers felt its chill, and despite having returned beneath the blankets, froze at his sides. </p>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. A green and yellow melancholy</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The night closed in.</p><p>As Madeleine approached his house, he discerned Javert’s shape pacing back and forth. He knew, then, that his time was short. The air was chill, the ground still wet from the day’s rain. Javert was here: was here to arrest him, surely, as he stood now within the cool borders of a single street light. His hands felt like shadow as he approached. He heard the sound of chains in his steps.</p><p>Except-- it was not to be. For, when he neared Javert, the light turned soft and runny, and Javert turned, hatless, coatless, with warmth from his breath looping about Madeleine’s neck and drawing him closer. This was not the Javert Valjean remembered dimly, a roaring, silent face above the roaring, deafening sea. This was not he who spoke in the flick of a cudgel. This was not Toulon, though the air was suddenly a stifling galley, too warm and too dark. But this air, too, was a caress, one which Madeleine had not known he craved.</p><p>Then Javert leaned in, and with hooded eyes Madeleine’s lips floated forwards, already parted, ready to meet with those lips which arrested his gaze so. A kiss. It would be simple, it would be–</p><p>Javert’s teeth were icicles, sinking into Madeleine’s lips, tearing away his Mayor’s face which did not hurt because it was paper, though the terrible rip sent a thousand blackened flies to blot Madeleine’s sight. No, there was no pain, only a cold, numbing dread. When the flies vanished, Javert’s face was once again changed, a sunken hollow thing with blood pouring from the side of his head like ink. There was a terrible sound of twisting metal and wires scraping against bone, and Javert faded into the moonlight which closed about him like glass, which traversed and grew till the yellow warmth was cut out and all was frozen except sound.</p><p>The sound grated against the scars which should not be Madeleine’s, cracking his back and wrists open till shadow was all that was left, and still there was no pain, only a choking. Then the moonlight too was snuffed out, and then it hurt to breathe.</p><p>Valjean awoke, one clawed hand rushing to his neck. His chest heaved as he tried to calm the hammering in it. He passed his hand over his face, fingers pushing along the line of his brow. A dream, like other dreams. Just a dream.</p><p>His palms pushed about the ridges of his brow, as if to assure themselves that the skin on them existed, that it still stretched over muscle and bone. Though it did, it felt loose, like clay that would not keep its form. There was no more moonlight, and only sun streamed through the windows. Faintly, he heard the strings of a fiddler in the street below. Sitting back, he gave a wince, and pressed his fingers to his temples.</p><p>Javert, it seemed, was waking too, as Valjean glanced over. The man’s body was a straight line, held to attention even when prone, completely still save for the rapid blinking of his eyes. Valjean imagined they were startled.</p><p>“Forgive me,” said Valjean. “It is I. It is just me.”</p><p>Javert’s eyes flicked back and forth but not quite in Valjean’s direction. He did not speak. The minutes stretched, languid and without concern for the lingering chill which blazed anew within Valjean. The eddies of his dream trickled in, and he tried again to brush it away from in front of him. Midway between a sigh, Valjean heard a noise issue from Javert, something like a choked whistle.</p><p>“But,” began Javert, his gaze still trained on the ceiling. His tongue ran against his teeth, as if testing out the phrase before he spoke it. The lips thinned, then pursed, then thinned again. Then they opened, and, “Who are you?”</p><p>The lips twisted, stilling finally.</p><p>“It is I,” said Valjean, voice soft.</p><p>“As you have said, monsieur,” replied Javert to the air above him. “But who is that?”</p><p>A strange, unexpected humour bubbled in Valjean then, for he realised he did not truly know what Cosette had him by in the hospital, now that she had read the letter, and with the multitude of names they had gone by before. A small laugh burst from his mouth. Javert’s eyes shot to Valjean at the sound, but Valjean did not notice for his hand passed across his face again as his fingers pushed at the front of his hair.</p><p>“I—I truly am not sure,” said Valjean. A nurse entered, bearing their breakfast. Valjean turned to her, “Ah, good madame,” he said. “Forgive a small curiosity, but who am I?”</p><p>The nurse was caught mid-step and regarded Valjean as one might a rabbit which had just growled. “You are M. Fauchelevent, monsieur,” she said, setting down the bowls. She pressed her lips together. “Are you well? Should I fetch the doctor?”</p><p>Valjean waved a hand, sweeping away the notion. “No, no, not at all. I—I merely wished to know if in her haste, my daughter had made me a Pontmercy.” It was a poor bluff, Valjean knew, but the nurse smiled and seemed to accept it. Javert made no comment, only received his bowl from the nurse, who seemed pleased that both patients were awake at the same time. No doubt it made her task much simpler.</p><p>It was plain porridge, but hearty, and warm, thought Valjean as he chewed. He was glad, for it grounded him.</p><p>About ten minutes into eating, a man appeared at the doorway Valjean had not seen before. The man looked to be on the cusp of thirty, perhaps just younger. Standing behind the vague swirl of sunlit dust motes, Valjean could see little except for his carriage. The man held himself well, but now as he stepped forward Valjean could see the hesitance in his steps.</p><p>At first, Valjean could not pin point why that hesitance seemed to him so jarring, but then all at once, he knew. The man’s face was leaner, perhaps, than the one he resembled. The eyes were deeper set, the nose sharper and the chin weaker, but his sideburns were tipped the way Javert’s were so carefully in Montreuil-Sur-Mer, and he wore a trim beard the way Javert would have. Had they sat side by side at this moment, the average acquaintance would have mistaken the man for Javert, and perhaps not recognised Javert at all.</p><p>Dark hair curled about the top of the man’s head, but the sides and back were trimmed, bordered about ears and neck. He was tugging at his fringe, looping a curl around his finger. Javert had not looked up from his meal as yet. The man coughed. Only the blue in the man’s eyes wavered, and his voice, a light baritone, carried itself steady. Javert looked up now, swallowing the remaining gruel in his mouth.</p><p>“Sir,” said the man.</p><p>“Ah, Cuif. So it was you.”</p><p>“Monsieur?”</p><p>“Who found me.”</p><p>“Ah, yes. Yes, Monsieur Javert.”  Cuif’s hand moved to comb about his ears, oddly boyish for his large frame. “It is good you are awake again.” Then Cuif caught himself, straightened his shoulders from the stoop they had been forming, and brought his hand down to his side.</p><p>“You will want details, sir, if I could—I have it written, but I did not know if you would have roused today. And—” he glanced quickly at Valjean. Javert did not follow his gaze, but waved aside Cuif’s apprehensions with his spoon, letting it angle back into his bowl.</p><p>“You may speak.” When Cuif hesitated still further, Javert added, “I am sure the gentleman is discreet.” Here Javert nodded slightly towards Valjean, and in the flatness of his voice Valjean detected a warning.</p><p>“Well, sir,” said Cuif stepping closer till he was just the foot of Javert’s bed, “Between the eve of June 6<sup>th</sup> and morning of June 7<sup>th</sup> this year, 1832, we had been combing the river banks and streets for robbers and disturbers of the peace, as you had asked us to. It was already getting dark, and some had returned to the Prefecture. You were not there to give the first debrief. Shortly after, messages were sent out.</p><p>“I was nearing Pont Neuf, and had been about to turn back to the Prefecture myself when the message came.” Cuif began fiddling with his coat sleeve, and he addressed the wall behind Javert’s head rather than Javert himself.</p><p>“We were not sure. You had not permitted yourself to be properly looked at after you returned from the final barricade,” said Cuif, and his eyes dipped. “The cut at your forehead had not been stitched—”</p><p>“Speak only what is relevant,” said Javert.</p><p>“Of course! Forgive me, sir. No, but, but it is relevant, sir. You had a gun sir, but one man is easily overpowered by a mob.” Cuif realised what he was saying, and dipped his eyes again, this time chin following. “Even—even you, sir,” he said in apology. “We feared that another kind of mob had arisen.”</p><p>The twitch of Javert’s lips betrayed his annoyance.</p><p>“And there was the matter of the letter.”</p><p>Javert’s eyebrows jerked his forehead up. “The letter?” he asked, puzzlement genuine.</p><p>“Yes. That is why the message was first sent out. A sergeant had seen you at the Place du Chatelet station house. You had sat and composed a letter but had not heard him when he asked if it was to be rushed to the Prefecture, merely left. The behaviour was unlike you, sir. He had sent the letter along to the Prefecture anyway, as you had indicated it should be so, in writing.</p><p>“Word got out. We had men lost already.”</p><p>“How many?”</p><p>“From our district, none, sir, but some from the others… did not manage to report back.”</p><p>Javert nodded. “You went with Allard, yes?”</p><p>“Yes, sir, but some from the other commissariats disregarded the pairs assigned.”</p><p>Valjean, who had been listening all this while, could no longer put on the pretence of eating his breakfast, as the gruel was almost completely gone. He pursed his lips accusatorily at the bottom of his bowl. As he raised his head, he heard Javert utter “ninnies” and a curse under his breath. Valjean allowed his eyes to slide towards the two men. Cuif’s fists were lightly clenched, as was Javert’s jaw.</p><p>“And in the end, we are forgotten, and Vidocq gets all the praise,” Cuif muttered.</p><p>“Inspector Cuif,” said Javert sharply. Cuif looked up. “None of that.” Javert’s tone was grave. “People praise who they will, it does not lessen our duty.” But he stumbled over the last word, and turned instead to grim silence, not hearing Cuif’s stammered apology. Minutes passed, till Valjean’s hand began to cramp from where it gripped his bowl. Cuif shifted on his feet, head bowed, waiting, it seemed, for permission to continue.</p><p>Javert was frowning at the covers. “A letter,” he muttered, half to himself. “What was in it?”</p><p>Cuif heard, and said, “I do not know, sir, I do know that M. Chabouillet took it before it could reach M. Gisquet.” A flush appeared at the top of his cheeks as Javert’s brow inched towards a glare, however slightly. Javert’s frown was at himself, though. He had not meant for his words to be heard. Cuif, now looking full at Javert and no longer at the wall, tripped out, “he seemed exasperated on seeing your writing, sir. That was when the messages were sent.”</p><p>“I did not think he would delegate men so.”</p><p>“Not all men. Many gamins roamed that night, silly to the carnage.”</p><p>Valjean watched as Javert’s breath seemed to catch at Cuif’s words: a stoppered hiccup which tugged within Valjean’s own belly. Javert’s hand lifted to his chest vaguely, towards the left, before dropping back on the covers. Javert himself seemed unaware of what his hand did.</p><p>“Ah,” Javert said.</p><p>“Yes, sir. Anyway, as it were, it was further up from Pont-Neuf, towards Pont-Au-Change, that I spotted you.”</p><p>Cuif rambled on.</p><p>“You had fallen into the river. If not for the washer woman’s boat the current would have dragged you beyond our reach. Two sergeants helped retrieve you, but we could not determine your injuries, or even if you were alive. We admitted you here. We—I think it could have been one of the Patron-Minette, but—” he shook his head.</p><p>Javert’s question was slowly uttered. “The Patron-Minette?” Valjean noticed the flattening of his brows, almost as if he were a dog cringing at an unpleasant shout hurled its way.</p><p>“Who harmed you, sir. But we have no real evidence.”</p><p>The press of brows did not release, and Javert’s question was once again slow in coming. “Then why do you believe so?”  His fingers, which had been curled about the sheets, unfolded themselves carefully. His palms now lay upturned on his lap. Cuif seemed not to notice, only heard Javert's words and scratched at the back of his neck as he replied.</p><p>“It was—ah, it was a week after, that I chanced upon Brujon. The big one, do you have any recollection of him that night, sir?”</p><p>Javert shook his head once. Cuif’s returning look was unhappy, and he had begun buttoning and unbuttoning his cuffs. “Well, you do not remember the letter, I suppose you would not remember that. But if we had your witness testimony, at least—”</p><p>“You still do not tell me why he is suspect, for this.”</p><p>“It is because—because—” fumbled Cuif, pausing a while before his eyes widened and he reached into his pocket. “Sometimes I forget, sir.” He carried on, “Forgive me, it has just been after my shift, you see.” The tip of his tongue stuck out at the top corner of his lips as he pushed his hand further into his pocket, and he did not speak till his fingers clasped around the object he was looking for. Lips curving upwards in a smile, he drew it out, and walked round the side of the bed to place it in Javert’s hand.</p><p>It was a Légionnaire.</p><p>Javert’s face had remained lifted, but his eyelids seemed almost shut as he looked down at the medal. Javert stared at it as though it had burnt a hole through his palm. Though the hand that held it remained open, the other had fallen to his side, and here they turned into loose claws, as if not quite daring to clutch again at his bedcovers. Cuif was still smiling, though now the smile had turned nervous.</p><p>“It is yours, sir.”</p><p>Javert kept his eyes on the medal.</p><p>“Brujon was attempting to sell it.</p><p>“It is yours.”</p><p>“It could belong to anyone,” said Javert, but the words wavered over his teeth.</p><p>“No, sir,” said Cuif, and shook his head. “You dropped it the night of the barricades in your haste to pin it back on. I was there, sir. And you nicked the back.” He turned the medal over in Javert’s palm, and sure enough, a light scar shot across the metal, the same Javert had thought nothing of after noting it by the Prefecture’s lamplight.</p><p>“I see,” said Javert, and he did see. “But I saw nothing of Brujon since they attempted to con a gentleman in the streets a few weeks prior.”</p><p>Cuif nodded, again unhappily. “It is so, sir.” Then he cheered slightly. “Though I am at least glad I could return this to you.” Javert tilted his head in acknowledgement, still looking at the medal. His fingers closed over it. He seemed to awaken further as the tips pressed into his skin, and a new frown crossed his brow.</p><p>“You say you’ve just ended your shift, Cuif?”</p><p>“Yes, sir.”</p><p>“You should not be here, wasting time with this.”</p><p>“Sir, I—”</p><p>“Did you eat?”</p><p>“Yes, sir, but I don’t—”</p><p>Javert interrupted with a flick of his chin. “You live in the next district,” said Javert. “Go home. You are of no use to anyone if you tire yourself with needless chores.”</p><p>“Sir—!” but Cuif’s protests were cut off when Javert raised his empty hand.</p><p>Javert looked up, then looked away for a moment as a new thought settled itself in his mind. “Who has been placed in charge of the commissariat?”</p><p>“Ah,” said Cuif, his knees bending and unbending slightly. “M. Gisquet appointed Devaux, sir—”</p><p>“<em>Monsieur</em> Devaux.” The chastisement was clear.</p><p>“M. Devaux,” Cuif corrected himself. He let out an agitated breath. “He had been waiting to a first posting at Lyon, sir, you see. He, ah, he leaves a lot of duties to us at the moment. He was never an inspector. A clerk, in taxes, I believe.”</p><p>Javert angled his head at this information, and the fist about the medal tightened.</p><p>“All the more you should sleep, Cuif. Go now.”</p><p>“Sleep, he says,” muttered Cuif, "when he stays all hours at his desk, when he does double patrol, when he walks into other precincts and acts on the behalf of the absent commissaires…” he looked at Javert now, challenge in his eyes. “It is true, sir. It is not a criticism. I wouldn’t dare, I wouldn’t—”</p><p>“You ramble often when you are tired, Cuif.” Cuif’s answer was the appearance of pink at his ears. “I know you. Go home.” Javert’s own voice sounded worn. Cuif’s mouth snapped shut, and he nodded stiffly.</p><p>“Yes, sir.” Cuif’s words were duller than they had been. He turned to leave, was about the door when Javert called out.</p><p>“Wait,” said Javert. Cuif’s hand dropped from where they had been on the doorpost. “Get me paper and ink. You wish to deprive yourself: I will let you a moment longer.”</p><p>The effect was immediate. Cuif’s smile was a contrast to the severe tilt of Javert’s mouth. Cuif called out to a nurse in the corridor.</p><p>Cuif looked now at Valjean, appraising him, and then, it seemed, deciding to take him into confidence. “You have before you a man who insists on being called the same title as his subordinates, monsieur. He tells us, ‘a doctor who becomes a CP keeps his title of doctor, why should I not do the same?’ and he bears a card that says Inspector, and all the gutter children and sundry folk think he is such and only such. It has advantages.” Cuif’s head bobbed up and down. “But it is frustrating.”</p><p>“Cease this,” said Javert, but there was no real venom to his words. Valjean’s lips quirked upwards. Yes, Cuif might look like Javert, but he was not, and with his ramblings it seemed Javert straightened that much more, seemed more like a Javert who pushed cropped hair over his temples in neat waves, and much, much less like a spider about to scuttle.</p><p>On being given the writing materials, Javert wrote a quick message, signed it, folded it, and handed it to Cuif. Valjean could not see what he had written, but looked on, his interest now undisguised.</p><p>“Only when you have rested,” said Javert. “These are directions to retrieve money, first to pay my porter, then to pay this hospital.”</p><p>“Ah, yes.” Cuif’s chin bobbed and this time he flushed.</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>“Your rent, sir. I have been visiting M. Boucher on your behalf.”</p><p>Javert’s looked as if his shoulder had just been pinked by a rapier. He pressed a knuckle to the bridge of his nose. Curtly, “We shall speak of this later, Inspector Cuif.”</p><p>“Sir.” Cuif’s heels clicked in attention, but the youthful cheer had diminished. He bowed, first to Javert, then to Valjean, and once more to Javert before retreating to the doorway.</p><p>This time he had only just passed Valjean’s bed when Javert spoke.</p><p>“You did well, Yvon.” Javert’s words were spoken low, but they glided through the room.</p><p>The curls of Yvon Cuif’s head fell forward as he stopped mid-step. His beard arched in such a way Valjean could see he was smiling. Cuif nodded to the inside of his collar, then departed. </p><p>“I had forgot,” said Valjean with a soft laugh as he looked towards the doorway Cuif had just disappeared round. When not even a snort answered him, he turned to face Javert, and said, “I had forgot you spoke in more than threats.” Or at least, that is what he had meant to say, but the words died on his lips when he saw Javert once again holding the medal, no, cradling, really, in the palm of his hand as his eyelids dropped towards it. Though Javert’s back had straightened more in Cuif’s presence, now it bent again, dragged down by a stiffened jaw.</p><p>Valjean, too, found his eyes drawn to the metal. An unease formed in his spine, something not easily shaken off. He considered the red ribbon which flowed between Javert’s fingers. There was something not quite right about this. Something—</p><p>Javert made again that aborted movement to the left of his chest. His hand waved at the air in front of it, and it was this motion, vague and uncertain as it was, which caused the unease in Valjean’s spine to splash over him like icy water. Valjean’s own hand went to hover at his heart.</p><p>“You were not wearing that medal when we met,” said Valjean. His heart now pulled against his lungs, and his hand, laid as it was against beating cloth, could not soothe it.</p><p>“When we met?” Javert’s voice sounded too far away, too within himself. He was not looking at Valjean.</p><p>“At the sewers,” Valjean managed.</p><p>“Ah, yes. Yes, I was not.”</p><p>Valjean’s fingers clutched at his shirt. The words of the night before came back to him. The memory of Javert’s mumbles again bubbled at him. Valjean’s next question poured out before he could dam it.</p><p>“You said you fell?”</p><p>Javert seemed not to hear him, at first. Then, “I fell.”</p><p>“You fell.”</p><p>“That would not be incorrect.”</p><p>“How—”</p><p>“It was quite deliberate.” Javert cocked his head to the side. “Only, the result was wanting.”</p><p>“I do not catch your meaning.” He thought of the night before. He had not caught Javert, and Javert had fallen beside him.</p><p>Javert swept a finger towards his legs with his free hand, his voice a blunted knife.</p><p>“I am invalid. Merely.” </p><p>“Temporarily, surely. And besides, then I am no different.” The edge to Valjean's words were sharper, tinged with something desperate.</p><p><em>Invalid</em>. The unease lapped again, this time within Valjean's core, and became something closer to dread. <em>Merely</em>. And what more should he have come to— No, Valjean could not conceive of it. Would not.</p><p>Javert considered Valjean.</p><p>“I think,” said Javert, as he looked Valjean up and down, “less so.” He looked away and began picking at the bedspread. The words should have been bitter, thought Valjean. They should have had at least the traces of a snarl. No, no. It was this flatness, this lack of anything which strung through Valjean and tugged and wrenched. The dream came back to him, his fingers spasmed against his breast, and he could not help the next words which shattered from his lips.</p><p>“Why did you throw away such honour?” And a gift, there had been a gift. A crucifix on a chain of beads. “Do you throw away all such tokens given to you?</p><p>“Bestowed upon you?</p><p>“Do you throw away all such–”</p><p>And once again, that low, edgeless voice.</p><p>“I throw away lies.”</p><p>Javert’s fingers clenched over the Légionnaire, knuckles whitening with the grip. He did not seem to feel where the points dug into his palm. Perhaps he truly did not, because it seemed the tips were piercing Valjean’s flesh instead, as he watched that fist concealing—what? An absence, the memory of that absence, of what had not been there when Valjean had stared at that unadorned uniform jacket almost two months ago. Absences should not feel so much like a caught lump, and still Javert’s hand remained closed, and still the morning closed in.</p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. You do think you are not what you are</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Valjean sat, words and bowl and spoon forgotten. Javert too, had fallen silent. After a time, he slipped the medal under his pillow. The nurse came in again, left, returned, inquired if they needed assistance in relieving themselves, if they required more food, if they wished for the curtains about their beds to be drawn, for privacy if it pleases you, messieurs, the doctor will be along shortly and—</p><p>Javert’s annoyed jerk of his forehead silenced her, though she did not leave without returning her own, disapproving frown before bustling out.</p><p>It was at this moment that M. Trousseau came in. He looked carefully from Valjean to Javert and back again, lips pursed, then approached Javert’s bed first.</p><p>“How are we this morning?”</p><p>Javert nodded. Trousseau took this as leave to inspect Javert, first feeling his forehead, then pulse. “You slept well through the night?” Again, Javert nodded. “Did you wake at all?”</p><p>Javert did not nod this time. He made a small gesture towards the foot of his bed instead. Trousseau glanced to it and spotted the chamber pot. His forehead drew itself together as he turned back to Javert.</p><p>“You are able to walk?”</p><p>“Not quite, doctor,” said Javert. Trousseau pursed his lips.</p><p>“Your bones are mostly healed, but the break was not clean in your left, and even for both, a jar or too much weight and it will grow crooked,” said Trousseau, and as Javert glanced to the side and down, his frown increased further.</p><p>“Did you fall?”</p><p>A pause, a grimace.</p><p>“Did you—”</p><p>“I did.”</p><p>“How badly?”</p><p>Valjean saw Javert shake his head, loosening the tangled fringe further. With a gesture to tuck a strand behind his ear, he spoke softly. “Both knees to the floor. I managed to get up without assistance. The pain was not unbearable.”</p><p>Trousseau <em>tch</em>ed.</p><p>“I don’t care for your threshold for pain, monsieur. Surely you do not want to cut your working years short?” Trousseau stood near the foot of the bed, drawing back the sheets so that Javert’s legs could be seen, and tilted his head, thinking. Then he nodded to himself, and:</p><p>“I shall have to remove the wrappings to ensure no undue swelling has occurred in the night after your actions,” he muttered in Javert’s direction.</p><p>“If you had provided crutches,” said Javert, and despite the growl of his voice, the words sounded like a child’s whine. His fingers were toying with the hair about his ears again.</p><p>“Yes, well,” said Trousseau. “We do not generally anticipate patients who cannot walk to attempt to do so without so much as a call for help.” Then he smiled. “I see your stubbornness in living might simply be stubbornness, monsieur.”</p><p>Javert dipped his head. “As you say.”</p><p>The doctor angled Javert a look which was ignored, then proceeded to unwrap the splints.</p><p>“It is good that your bed sores are minimal, but you have not been able to scratch or move, I suppose. The itching may get worse for a time,” he said as he lifted one of Javert’s legs. “And you are restless, which is a good thing. Your body, recovering naturally, desires movement.”</p><p>Trousseau began prodding gently along Javert’s shin. “Let me you know if you feel any pain,” he said. Javert shook his head at each spot, until Trousseau prodded at a discoloured patch of skin, at which he hissed slightly. “Ah, your new badge of honour,” said Trousseau. Valjean winced at the words, but Javert’s face was, apart from bearing the new discomfort, a cool mask.</p><p>“This is newly formed, from last night, I presume.” The doctor frowned further at the leg. “It is good that nothing seems out of alignment,” he said. “And this is the leg that was broken in two places.” He then repeated the procedure on the other leg, Javert’s right. After a while he nodded. “Good, good, neither have any undue swelling.” He looked sternly again at Javert as he said this.</p><p>“If you could, provide crutches,” said Javert, chin tilting further down.</p><p>Trousseau nodded amiably as he returned his attention to the shins. As he re-wrapped the splints, he spoke. “Yes, yes, of course. It is hard to keep an active man still. And I suppose you will want to rest at home sooner than later, yes? Yes.” Once he ensured that the wraps were secured, he prodded at the toes, asked Javert to flex and curl them, his chin and nose bobbing up and down in satisfaction.</p><p>“Yes,” said Trousseau, “I suppose it is not quite like being crushed by a cart, hmm? Though it is in some ways wors—”</p><p>A cough from Javert interrupted him. Or at least, it would have been a cough, had it not been mixed with what sounded like a word crammed against his palate. The doctor looked askance at Javert, who had hunched over unexpectedly, who once again looked as if he was choking on speech. Then a word pushed its way through.</p><p>“Fauchelevent.” </p><p>It came out a contracted gurgle. The doctor did not quite hear, but Valjean did, and felt his breath skitter to a stop.</p><p>Javert cleared his throat, tried to take a breath, wheezed again. “Fauchelevent,” he said, and this time the name could not be mistaken. Valjean knew now that Javert remembered.</p><p>Concern: for Javert’s sudden coughing, and puzzlement: at the sudden naming of Fauchelevent, merged on Trousseau’s face. He reached for his stethoscope, looking at Valjean at the same time. Valjean himself looked as if he bore a great weight on his neck, though he smiled weakly at the doctor. Was it the light which caused Valjean to squeeze his eyes shut a moment longer than a blink? Perhaps. Perhaps not.</p><p>“You have met?” ventured Trousseau as he laid the stethoscope to Javert’s chest. This question succeeded not in delivering an answer from either man, but prompted another round of coughs from Javert (and were they this time intermingled with snarls or that just Valjean’s imagination).</p><p>“You could say,” managed Valjean, when Javert seemed unable to.</p><p>Just then, Marius and Cosette entered the room.</p><p>Valjean watched as Javert’s eyes shot both to Valjean’s daughter and son-in-law, moving back and forth before focusing on Marius. Javert’s eyes widened as they flit to Cosette then back to Marius, twice, three times more, and he seemed to catch himself, before he turned back to look down, shoulders shaking. But it was not from coughing. It was, Valjean realised, from laughter, as much as laughter could be, crumpled as it was in Javert’s stomach.</p><p>Bitter lines lifted Javert’s lips into a smile. His lowered head hid it from Trousseau, but not from Valjean. As he stilled, Trousseau nodded, though the puzzlement did not quite leave his face.</p><p> “Very good,” Trousseau said, though his nonchalance seemed too careful. “You are sociable today. You were quite difficult during your fever.” Javert’s face twisted into a smirk, which then vanished as he closed his eyes and leaned into the pillows.</p><p>Trousseau nodded again. “Yes, well—” and here he turned to Valjean. “M. Fauchelevent does not quite look as if he has been run over. But run down, perhaps,” he reached to take Valjean’s pulse.</p><p>“Did you sleep well last night?” Trousseau enquired. Valjean nodded, but Trousseau seemed unconvinced.</p><p>“Dreams?”</p><p>“I—yes,” said Valjean. His eyes slid unbidden to Javert as he spoke, and he found that he could not draw them away. “I woke from them this morning.” He could not look at Cosette, not even when he felt a slim hand press into his own.</p><p>The doctor hummed, pursing his lips. “It is not a bad thing. And your body, too, is recovering.” Trousseau smiled at Cosette. “Your Lazarus is doing well, madame.”</p><p>“Thank you, monsieur,” said Cosette, smiling, then her voice turned a hint sharper. “If he would not conceal himself and waste away so again.” She placed her hand on Valjean’s shoulder, and Valjean took it, smiling softly. No, her presence would always be a balm. With this thought, his eyes turned to Cosette. She was looking up at Marius, her cheeks dimpled impishly. “Martyrdom doesn’t suit Papa, does it, Marius?”</p><p>Marius answered the twinkle in her eyes with his own warm smile. “Of course not, Cosette.”</p><p>Valjean heard Javert shift in his bed, along with a quiet snort. This time, it seemed he could <em>not</em> look at Javert. However, Cosette quite evidently could. She leaned around Trousseau as the doctor now examined Valjean’s eyes and directed her attention to Javert.</p><p>“Monsieur, we heard M. Trousseau mention that you and Papa have spoken?” she asked. Valjean heard more shifting, then felt the flutter of a gaze fall over his face. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Javert’s nod: slow, singular. Once Trousseau had released him, Valjean’s brows drew back, and he swallowed. His hand, still holding onto one of Cosette’s, squeezed lightly. But Cosette’s tone only turned teasing in her pursuit.</p><p>“Is he a reasonable bedfellow?”</p><p>“We do not share a bed, madame,” said Javert, his tone even. This earned a laugh from Cosette, but unease stirred Valjean’s insides, mixing heart with gut.</p><p>“And what is your name, good monsieur? I am Cosette,” said Cosette. “And this is Marius.” She gestured towards Marius, who bowed. Valjean found it in him to look at Javert, who in turn was looking at Marius. Trousseau had left the room. Javert’s gaze shifted to Cosette.</p><p>“I am Javert, madame,” he said, with a slight bow. His gaze returned to Marius, who had taken a step back. Marius caught himself, and leaned forward, mouthing the name as he did so.</p><p>The unease in Valjean roiled further.</p><p>“Cosette said you were at the barricades.” said Marius.</p><p>“I was there,” said Javert. His gaze held Marius’ steady, but the boy seemed to stare off into the distance.</p><p>Marius murmured to himself so quietly that even Valjean had to strain to hear. “Javert—there was a spy—” his shoulders gave a slight jerk, and he looked down. “They said an old revolutionary killed him. Someone who snuck into the barricades after the first attack. I heard the gunshot.”</p><p>“Marius?”</p><p>Marius shook himself. “No, Cosette, it is not anything—it is—” he looked again at Javert, hands twitching near the hem of his waistcoat. His voice gained strength. “You were there,” he said to Javert.</p><p>“Yes,” replied Javert, lifting his head higher. Marius’ shoulders had slumped. Cosette now held herself very still, her mouth slightly agape. It seemed the air in the room had changed, got thinner, as both Marius and Valjean sucked in a breath. Marius was rubbing the back of his neck, grabbing at the hairs at the base. Javert remained silent. Then when no one spoke,</p><p>“It is not my present duty to arrest you.”</p><p>Marius started at that, as if the thought had not occurred to him, and conversely, though his safety was now assured, looked about to bolt. The silence stretched. When Marius spoke again, his voice was thickened with spit.  </p><p>“Combeferre would have been pleased, monsieur, to know that you lived.” Tears sprung at his eyes, even as his mouth twitched upwards. “I suppose Gavroche would not.”</p><p>“The boy,” said Javert, and Marius’ head jerked up.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Javert regarded Marius. “The boy had courage.”</p><p>Marius’ trembling smile grew larger. “He did. He did and you—” he stopped himself, shook his head, patted Cosette’s shoulder, though once lifted his hand clenched and unclenched.</p><p>“Forgive me, dearest, I did not mean—” he stopped again, and studied the floorboards. Voice wavering, he spoke again.</p><p>“For Combeferre, I do not begrudge you your life.” His voice strengthened. “Your life—spared—” comprehension dawned on his face, and he inhaled sharply, then looked at Valjean. His smile, though wane, lost a hue of the sickly pallor that they had before.</p><p>“Of course,” he whispered.</p><p>“What is it, Marius?” Cosette asked.</p><p>“Your father, Cosette. He saved more than one soul that day.” Marius’ eyes stayed fixed on Javert. Javert looked evenly back. </p><p>“Yes, well,” said Cosette, “I do not understand why he would then not save himself.” With this, Marius laughed, and wiped at his eyes.</p><p>“Trust you, Cosette, to make me forget my grief again,” he said, though he turned sombre eyes to Javert. “Though I think, I think I shall wait outside this time, Cosette.” His voice lowered, and gently he lifted a finger to stroke Cosette’s cheek. “I am fine.” He gave Javert a final glance before turning. Then he walked out of the ward.</p><p>Cosette looked on after his retreating back. A frown lit her features (lit, thought Valjean, because nothing could mar it). She was silent, considering both Valjean and Javert in equal measure. She took a breath, halted, and took another. Then, she laid a hand on Valjean’s knee.</p><p>“So. Papa.” Her lips pursed. “Papa, you saved M. Javert, who was at the same barricade Marius was at?”</p><p>“It is so.”</p><p>“Well then,” said Cosette, clapping her hands together with an air of finality. “It is so. The world is full of coincidences!”</p><p>Valjean did not expect the scoff that came from Javert, sounding as if it had been ground under a heel before its release.</p><p>“It is so,” said Javert, adding the final echo. He smirked then, an empty, sodden sort of smirk, then his eyes closed in a prolonged blink. When he opened them, he turned to Cosette, and bowed at the neck. “Madame.” With that, he turned away, and settled back into the bed. “There are curtains should you wish privacy,” he said, gesturing behind them at the curtains.</p><p>“There is no need,” said Valjean quietly to Cosette when she made to stand. She nodded.</p><p>The hour she stayed both soothed and troubled Valjean. He found that he could not concentrate on her words. Though she chattered on, her voice was drowned by the silence that emanated from Javert’s bed; from Javert’s back. By the end of the hour, feeling as it was like three, Valjean’s bedspread had been pulled and crumpled into deep folds about his hands. When Cosette left him, with a kiss to his forehead, he had sighed, and tried to reassure her with a smile. He was not sure if he had.</p><p>When she was out of earshot, he found himself sighing again, this time louder. Javert did not respond to it. In fact, Javert did not speak for the remainder of the day, not when Pierre had brought in the crutches, nor when lunch or dinner was served. It grated on Valjean. Midway through dinner, he swallowed against food and words, then said, “It was good of you to assure Marius.”</p><p>“I did no such thing. I merely did not dissemble.”</p><p>Valjean did not get more words from Javert that evening, and when night came, so did the dreams.</p><p>Once more, he was Madeleine. Once more, Javert stood, as he had in M-Sur-M. Coatless, shivering, pacing, and once more the light turned as it were the colour of marigolds, and Javert smiled with a smile that tugged at Madeleine’s chest, and shed his uniform jacket. This time when he kissed Madeleine his lips were soft and tender against cool skin and though winter came too early there was warmth, there was warmth, and Madeleine closed his eyes against the current of air that whispered about him.</p><p>Javert did not speak, but Javert’s body thrummed with words that Madeleine thought he could hear, and they were not unpleasant words.</p><p>Then more light came. Blinding, chilling, hissing light which froze away all softness, and when Valjean drew back, Javert’s face had hollowed. The ink was spilling once more from his forehead, black and thick, marring his temple and cheek. And in the distance Valjean saw the bludgeon that had caused it: a cross, its silhouette wavering between a Legion of honour and a crucifix. It turned, and turned, and knocked Valjean back, and bore on Valjean’s shoulders. For now it was the shaft of a cart, one which he could neither lever nor lift to save the silent man beneath it: the man was Javert, crushed slowly, with eyes shadowed by the axle of the cart raking his body further and away from Valjean.</p><p>And Javert here spoke a single “Monsieur”, soft and tremulous and terrible all at once. And there was a roar, and the ink flowing from Javert’s head became a river which scrawled <em>It is so</em> and Valjean clutched vainly at fading shadows—</p><p>Valjean awoke, still seeing the shrunken, creviced face of Javert before him as his eyes shot open. His heart thudded in his ears, and his knees bent and buckled all at once as he scrabbled to sit up. He was on the floor. The night’s gloom was awful. The silence was awful. Sweat trailed down his brow; collected beneath his lashes and stung at his eyes. He moved, unseeing, feeling floorboards, hearing the quiet breaths of the sleeping form near him, hearing—</p><p>“Monsieur.”</p><p>Valjean’s gasp was unheard to himself as he spun towards Javert’s bed, thinking himself mistaken, wishing he were not. The noise came again, and the sheets rustled as Javert tossed lightly.</p><p>Javert. As he looked at him, shadows cast like blood across the man’s forehead. That blood, which he had seen and been unable to wipe at the barricades, because it would not suit, because he had not dared, that blood which turned to rivers and cut off Valjean’s air—it rose out of the darkness within which half of Javert’s face lay. If he could just—if he could just be sure.</p><p>Nightmare still clinging to him, Valjean stumbled forward, forward, till his hand too dipped into the shadows to light on Javert’s brow.</p><p>“Monsieur.” The word was murmured again, no longer polite, seeking almost, perhaps, something in Valjean’s palm. Valjean’s hand sighed, and his thumb smoothed away the locks of hair at Javert’s forehead. Javert stilled, his lips now parted as they were around the last syllable.  </p><p>Silence.</p><p>Then a hand shot out and grabbed Valjean’s shirtfront. Valjean cried out, surprised, as he was pulled forwards and down. His free hand flew to steady himself, landing just at Javert’s shoulder. Javert’s eyes were open. Javert stared full at Valjean, his eyes almost as black as the room about him.</p><p>“Javert.” The name tasted like wax. Valjean’s tongue clicked against his teeth. He tried again. “Javert—”</p><p>“You are no doctor,” said Javert. His breath shot, warm and cold at once, landing square on the join of Valjean’s neck and jaw. Valjean swallowed, his throat suddenly rough, and repressed a shiver.</p><p>“No,” said Valjean, and watched as his own breath lifted Javert’s fringe.</p><p>“No,” he said again, as the night pressed in around them. He took a breath. “But I had to be—I had, you were under the cart, I could not—”</p><p>“A cart,” said Javert, then his face twisted. It was, if Valjean were inclined to morbidity, like a rictus. The laughter which had lain crumpled in Javert earlier in the day leapt up now and delivered itself harsh and grating against Valjean’s skin. Javert’s grin split his face, though he did not push to sit up, only pulled Valjean closer and closer till his laughter threw itself within the walls of Valjean’s skull.</p><p>“Ridiculous,” he heard Javert mutter as the echoes of that horrible sound rippled away. Though as his fist remained buried in Valjean’s shirt, Javert no longer looked at him. “It always begins with a cart.” His eyes snapped left and right as he mulled and muttered, then they snapped up again to Valjean. The grin had become a sneer.  </p><p>“Fauchelevent,” said Javert. Valjean shook his head.</p><p>“Why won’t you say my name?” The words limped from his lips. His hand still lay on Javert’s brow, almost forgotten. Almost, because he felt those eyebrows shift as Javert looked up.</p><p>Javert turned his head, knocking aside Valjean’s hand with his jaw. He spoke to the pillow. “Is it not Fauchelevent?”</p><p>“You know me, Javert. You know the truth, why, for the past two days have you not—”</p><p>“The truth?”</p><p>Valjean felt a force beat the breath back into his chest, and stumbled. Javert had shoved him.</p><p>Javert now regarded Valjean, who stood, hand held to his heart, breathing anguish at his bed. His fingers twitched against the covers. He could still feel the warmth of Valjean’s hand and still feel his pulse race along the print that hand had left. He longed to wipe it off.</p><p>“The truth,” uttered Valjean, and Javert had to dam the mad laughter that swelled within him, that if it broke, would be a storm he could not navigate.</p><p>What was truth?</p><p>There was a man called Jean Valjean, who broke a window pane, who trespassed a baker’s shop, who stole. That man existed on yellowed paper and the crumbling documents of Javert’s memory.</p><p>There was a prisoner who went by the number 246O1, who had incredible strength, who could lift a sodden mast after a day of toil. This was not the withered man before him.</p><p>There was a prisoner with a shaven head and cracked face who murmured broken nothings into his chains. The imprint of that recollection was a hollow, hollow thing which sometimes whispered in the night, which had been filled over time by other faces.</p><p>There was a man in the garb of the National Guard, who pulled Javert through a backdoor and killed him with kindness, leaving him in the outer darkness. There was a man covered in the waste of Paris, beside whom he felt dirtier though his own clothes were spotless.</p><p>Just a man, that man had said. Not convict. Not criminal.</p><p>Not mayor.</p><p>“I knew a man called Madeleine, once. I found out he was a lie.” Yes, because it seemed less an accusation than murder, though Madeleine was indeed dead, sunken in his watery grave at M-Sur-M. A grave Javert too had peered at, had realised—</p><p>He considered. What had he seen in the frenzied swirls of the Seine?</p><p>A mayor in an olive-green jacket and a trim waistcoat who had smiled at him and made him come in out of the cold, who made him forget duty. A mayor who had leapt into the outer darkness (the same outer darkness) willingly, with no gnashing of teeth, no wailing (for that was reserved for Javert). </p><p>He had looked into the rapids of the Seine and seen the disappearing ends of an olive-green jacket. And he had seen a dead man’s face. He had heard a dead man’s voice, one which whispered <em>I am thy prisoner</em>—</p><p>“I knew a creature called 246O1. I know him to be fact. But he eluded me. I could not find him. I cannot.”</p><p>Valjean took a step back, sat on his own bed, silent.</p><p>“I knew a man called Jean Valjean, once. Another lie.” Always, always, Jean Valjean. A demon once exorcised for a fleeting day, only to return with a vengeance when evening came.</p><p>“There was a man, of Faverolles. They said he was a tree-pruner.” He heard Valjean’s breath hitch. “But I never knew him.”</p><p>“What is truth?” Javert asked, keeping his voice wooden. He was no arbitrator of that. Chabouillet had, in his teachings, mentioned that governor, that Pontius Pilate who said the same while washing his hands in a basin. Javert had thought to wash himself in the Seine. He had thought to cleanse himself in the river. To wash himself away: the stain that was him. At the very least, he had thought to wash himself of Valjean, or Valjean of him. He was no longer sure which.</p><p>In any case, a strange baptism.</p><p>---</p><p>~1780~</p><p>“He needs a name, and she will not give him a name.”</p><p>Julien did not look up from his papers, though his hand half rose as if to pinch the bridge of his nose.</p><p>“She has only just birthed,” he said.</p><p>“Two days ago,” corrected Julien’s wife.</p><p>“Two,” repeated Julien.</p><p>“Yes, and the midwife has come and cleaned and gone, and come by again, and gone again, and she just sits there. The baby cries, he needs to be fed, and she will not.”</p><p>“Gabrielle.”</p><p>“I say to you, husband—”</p><p>“He looks quiet now.”</p><p>“Only because he has fallen asleep. And no, I would not have you wake him.”</p><p>“Have we another in the prison who might be a wet-nurse?”</p><p>“You would trust someone within those cells?”</p><p>Julien made a noise of irritation. “If you could speak to her—”</p><p>“She will not even hold him!” Julien now looked at his wife, whose voice had suddenly risen in pitch. On her part, she had turned sharply to the bundle in her arms, and when she had assured herself that it did not stir, returned her glare to her husband. Julien was sure that if not for her cargo, her arms would be crossed. He sighed.</p><p>“Very well, bring him closer.”</p><p>The baby was brought to the candlelight. His forehead was puckered. His eyes were shut. Still wrinkled, he already looked as if the cares of the world had wormed themselves into his face before he should have been due them.</p><p>“There is the young one, who just lost hers,” said Julien slowly, as he watched the light play off the bundled new-born. “She might be more than willing to nurse this child.”</p><p>At this moment, the baby’s eyes opened. Pupils wide, he gazed up at Gabrielle’s face, then squirmed, crinkling his cheeks about his eyes.</p><p>“Ah, <em>tcht</em>, now he wakes,” said Gabrielle, altering the crook of her arms to accommodate him. The baby caught sight of Julien, and stared, and ceased the soft mewls that issued from his throat. Gabrielle began bobbing the babe up and down, though he now lay calm, and kept his gaze on Julien, as if trying to solve a puzzle in the new face before him.</p><p>“Jasper,” said Julien. It was a goodly name. His wife made a scoffing sound.</p><p>“You cannot call him Jacques or Jean as anyone with sense would. No, your son goes off to war and you name a poor gypsy woman’s child after a stone,” she said, then muttered, “As if he will last, as if he is a precious thing to you.” She cooed the last lines to the babe, as if to have the baby side with her. The babe looked back, quiet, his tiny brow still furrowed.</p><p>“Life is—”</p><p>“Life is harsh, husband. You grow sentimental because Michel is not here.” She continued rocking the babe, this time moving closer to the hearth.</p><p>“Besides,” she said, cradling the baby closer. “How could he possibly grow into that name?”</p><p>“Names are for people to aspire to.”</p><p>“Names can only disappoint, then,” said Gabrielle. “And he is such a tiny, ugly thing.” But her eyes were gentle, and so was her voice. “If he even lives to five, what is the use of such loftiness? No, no, isn’t that right, baby?” The baby made a gurgling noise in response, and Julien found himself smiling.</p><p>“What would you have, then, wife?”</p><p>Born in scum, born in jail, without even a memory of a father’s name. The mother would not say where the child’s father was. It would be unkind to think that she did not, in fact, know who had fathered her son, but thoughts like that flitted in and out of men’s minds anyway.</p><p>“Javert,” said Gabrielle. “All rotted and loathsome.” Her voice was tender.</p><p>“You curse him, surely.”</p><p>“I do not, husband.” She arched her brow. “It will not be so hard to rise above that name.”</p><p>“And if he doesn’t,” she said, looking back down at the child, now Javert. “Then it matters little.”</p><p>Javert yawned, a tiny pink tongue darting out of his toothless mouth. He began to make soft, smacking noises, and Gabrielle’s look turned even gentler, even as she roughly said, “Yes, yes, and we shall find you a wet nurse this moment, before your wails threaten to bring down the cell doors.”</p><p>At least, thought Julien, it showed the child had great will to live. This was good. He thought of his son, and he thought of this child, Javert, assuredly no angel, and not bearing the name of any. But angels fell, so perhaps this name <em>was</em> good. Javert, whose blue-grey eyes had glowed with reflected candlelight and who looked so seriously upon an old man, and yawned.</p><p>“We bring him to the priest tomorrow.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Hold acquaintance with the waves</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>~1832~</p><p>“A wash basin, if you please. Scissors. A razor, small towels. Lather, and a small mirror if you have that to spare,” Javert said to the nurse. Once received, the wash basin was placed on the chair beside his bed, and the remaining items laid in a row on the bedspread.</p><p>Valjean was once more looking at him.</p><p>It would not be long before he would be free from having to endure those eyes.</p><p>That morning, Valjean had looked at him as he wrestled with his trousers (without the aid of a nurse or student doctor, thank you), and hastily rewrapped his bandages, his hands aching even as he secured the wraps. Valjean continued looking when Javert had requested the basin and shaving items.</p><p>God damn those eyes.</p><p>Javert chose to grip the razor, though his palm itched to wipe at his forehead. Valjean’s touch still clung to it, and through the nights it had been layered with other touches (though indeed, it was good that Valjean had not attempted to reach his bedside again since three nights prior). Touches he would rather have forgot. Fingers gripping the back of his head, pulling the hair taut. And even then—as memory warped—it had not been taut enough. No, he would not think it. He would not—</p><p>In his dreams the images would bend and twist again, becoming fingers carding his hair in a gentler vice, fingers pressing into his chest, gentler still. He dug and he dug, and he buried those memories, but the soil of his mind coughed them back up again, along with the weight of something metal and cold looped about his neck: something long discarded. Always, always, rearing back to mock him. Ah yes, those eyes. They stirred something in him he no longer wished to feel. No, he corrected himself, no: he no longer felt. He had grown cold to this. Over the course of eight winters he had grown cold, the grate of his heart dusty and unused.</p><p>He moved the razor—shook his hair over his face. He had spent too many nights in the hospital. His face, looking back at him, was not one he recognised. He did not look at the face, or hands, of the one he, to the point of absolute irritation, could not help <em>but</em> know.</p><p>Reaching for the lather, he realised belatedly that his beard was perhaps too long for that. He placed the razor down and took up the scissors. Order, there would be order. There was a method to these things.</p><p>As he snipped, his uncut fringe left his cheeks itching. Another itch grew, the bedsores of his mind turning themselves over and oozing with noisome silence along with the plaintive looks the man in the bed beside him seemed to be casting. He might as well have taken Javert by the shoulders and rattled him. The effect would have been the same.</p><p>They had not spoken, yet, not since that night. He had refused, and the old man had not attempted to address him further. But now their conversation was the myriad of sighs that Valjea—<em>the man</em> let out, whether in his daughter’s company or otherwise. Javert heard them, heard them at night when the man slept, heard them even in moments when the man gave no utterance. The sound had lodged itself in the shell of Javert’s ear.</p><p>It was utterly unbearable.</p><p>He snipped at his beard, even as another sigh sniped at his head. He grit his teeth against the noise, as he brushed the hairs caught between the blades to a pile on the chair. Yes, it was good that he would leave today. He would not wait for Cuif. He had decided. Though the bustle of Paris managed to filter through the windows, it seemed that the air could not, and yes, he had decided that he needed air.</p><p>By the time he had finished, and placed the scissors back on the bed, the itching sighs seemed an echoing cacophony. He almost added his own to it. A chirping bird outside distracted him a moment, and so he did not.</p><p>Instead, words slipped from him in a clouded sort of mutter: “Stop that.” He looked at the water in the basin so he would not have to look at the man. But he imagined the man turning to him anyway, eyes startled, perhaps, hand rising to his chest, perhaps, the thin lines of his brow drawing to a point above his nose. Javert frowned at himself. He should not have been able to envision the man so clearly in his imagination.</p><p>The man shifted in his bed. “Javert?” Javert steeled his jaw against a cringe at the address.</p><p>“Monsieur,” said Javert, though he looked to the basin. He reached for the lather. “Your thoughts—” He pursed lips. “Your thoughts are too loud.” His bottom lip twitched, and he pressed it back to meet the top as he spread the lather over his cheeks, still only looking at the basin. Now, the mirror, his own reflection, his hair falling over the tips of his ears in growth he had not allowed himself since his youth. And over the mirror’s rim, in front of him, <em>that man</em> sat upright, legs swung from over his bed’s edge. It would not be hard to shift his gaze from his reflection to the man’s face. From the corner of his vision he saw the man pass a hand over his face (another habit he knew well) and could have sworn the man was smiling. The thought niggled, poked at Javert till he brought his eyes level to check if he was right.</p><p>He was. He wished he hadn’t checked.</p><p>Now that their gazes met, Javert found himself unwilling to look away. It would seem, it would seem—what, exactly? Something felt coiled in his belly, crouched and dangerous like a viper. To look away would be to concede—concede what? He did not know. Something. Something he would not.</p><p>Deliberately, he took the razor and sloped it against his cheek, his eyes stuck fast on the man, as if daring him to avert his gaze first. The blade touched the edge of Javert’s jaw, and he felt the cool metal against his skin. The man’s eyes flicked there now, smile faltering as Javert let the blade travel lower, scraping soap and hairs along, letting them fall past his chin. It was foolish to do this without a mirror, Javert knew. There was the chance of nicking himself, but he forced himself to keep looking at the other man. Already he felt a strange surge of triumph, in this, that he could do this unfalteringly. As he moved to the next portion along his jaw, he steeled his chin again. So focused was he on the man’s eyes, and how they no longer looked at his, that he did not notice that the man was biting his lip till those lips slacked apart and sucked in a breath. </p><p>“You might hurt—” said the man, and looked away. It was this that allowed Javert to do the same, if momentarily.</p><p>“I will not,” replied Javert. He wiped the blade against the towel and lifted it again to his face. He caught his bottom lip between his teeth as he shaved now at his jowl. When he raised his eyes to the man again, he saw that the other’s eyelashes were angled towards his jaw. His lips. His teeth.</p><p>He would have bared them: his teeth, that is, but his body rebelled. He bit harder on his lip instead, and swallowed, and remembered to breathe through his nose. The other man’s face was but three feet away. It might as well have been three inches. And he was no longer looking at the man’s eyes either. He too, took in the sight of the man’s lips, worried red against his pale skin, and the man’s cheek, coated in stubble, and a small, wistful voice within him wondered what it would be like to drag a razor across that skin—</p><p>He snatched the blade away from his neck before an accident occurred. He took a breath. No. His hands were still steady. Yes. He wiped the blade on his towel. At least the other man’s thoughts seemed to have finally fallen blank. Or perhaps the faint roar in Javert’s ears dimmed them. He could not be sure.</p><p>He began on the next side. This time he kept his eyes trained on the mirror, and on his reflection. Yes, slowly, he was becoming himself, or at least, a semblance of himself. The hair falling about his face, all waves and half-curls, looked foreign as he pushed the strands behind his ear, away from his jaw. Once he had finished shaving, he brushed at the strands again, and as he did so, his eyes were pulled inexorably back to the other man. The thing which had coiled in him earlier twisted, turned into something warmer, nosing insistently at his shoulder, at his back, at his thigh. The roaring had grown louder. The man’s lips had fallen into a small O, and—</p><p>Javert pushed a final lock of hair to the side of his forehead, rougher than he intended. He splashed water over his cheeks, leaning over the basin and washing away the soap. When he surfaced the tips of his fringe were wet, but he did not try to push them aside again.</p><p>The crutches. He reached from them, fingers gripping tighter than they needed to. When he heaved himself up, the blood seemed to rush from his head, and he had to pause as the room grew black, waiting till it faded to red, then to the outlines of the room.</p><p>He took a few steps forward, remembering to lean more on his right leg. He— the chair was positioned strangely, too close to the bed to move around that side, and too close to the other man for Javert to want to pass through. But he could not move it with his hands, and did not trust the strength of his legs. A small puff of air escaped him, ruffling his fringe as he looked down at his feet. He would have to make his way around the chair, between that and <em>him</em>, who was not about to move. Javert shuffled forward, jaw grimly set.</p><p>Then a foot that was not Javert’s slid forward and pushed the chair. The water in the basin sloshed, but did not spill out as it shifted along with the surface it rested on. Javert stopped, and did not move till its waves subsided. There. He did not look at the foot’s owner. He narrowed his eyes at the floorboards as he walked forward, past the other bed and the fingers which lingered half raised by its occupant, one foot forward, then the next, and the next, then finally, finally—</p><p>A hand reached out and grasped Javert’s sleeve. The cloth stretched against his skin, and through them he felt the steady warmth of another’s. He could not bat it away for that would mean releasing his hold of the crutch, and the thought of falling again was unthinkable. Certainly not in front of—of—of <em>him</em>. Javert grunted, his lips a tight line, and tried to shift.</p><p>Eventually, the man released him, but not before Javert had caught sight of the mouth which shaped <em>Please</em> and a pair of eyes which whispered <em>Stay.</em> Javert would not be commanded so.</p><p>Javert left.</p><p>The trousers chafed against the back of his knees as he sat in the carriage, grimacing with each new jolt as he passed through the city. Paris moved, as always, with wheels and hooves and shoes against cobbled stones, and there were no more barricades.</p><p>He was to reach his flat.</p><p>He had to squint against the light as he emerged, but it was better than the dust in the hospital ward which danced against that man’s lashes and caused them to glisten. Not that he had noticed. He would not notice. He hobbled down from the carriage, stepping into a puddle. It lapped at his feet, and as he saw the slight splash, fancied for a moment they were the colour of blood. Just as it had been at the barricades: the bodies of soldiers, the bodies of students, the bodies of boys. He tasted rust in his mouth, and felt death sting the back of his nose.</p><p>No, not to the river again. In this he had failed, he knew. Death had given him up. He would not attempt to cajole its favour again just yet. This much, this much he knew. It was in any case, perhaps, too merciful a punishment.</p><p>But Javert did not know if it was, in fact, punishment he had sought.</p><p>With this, hand and key still half to his door, he lowered them and turned down the street.</p><p>He walked. He walked till it was dark.</p><p>Eventually, he reached the bridge Pont Notre-Dame. The water was stiller than it was at Pont au Change, but they still flowed swollen beneath him. Here, he stopped. He looked down. The Seine was as he remembered: black, a yawning void. Swaying, he reached out and gripped the parapet, not caring if his crutches fell to the ground. The river pounded in his ears, turning his knuckles stark white against the stone. He leaned over, further, till his belly was bent in, the parapet a file against his stomach. Deeper, it dug, deeper, but it would not quell the Seine’s voice, now the sound of metal scraping against skin, against rope, now the stench of sewage. The black swarmed up towards him. He leaned forwards. His stomach roiled.</p><p>He retched. Bile rushed against his throat and exited his mouth, leaving behind their sickness upon his tongue. He heaved again, and more followed. There was little to vomit: he had not eaten dinner. Breathing heavily, he thought he still heard the echoes of his gagging against the bridge. He wiped his mouth, and on feeling distaste rise in his nostrils had to hold his knuckles against his lips a while longer.</p><p>He heard the sound of vomiting again, but this time not from him. It sounded further away. He turned, and saw a man propped up, just barely, like himself, a few feet to the right.</p><p>“Ah, monsieur, forgive me I—” the man hiccupped, and ran the back of his hand over his mouth, muttering “forgive me” again. He giggled a little to himself as he tried to raise himself from the parapet. Javert did not respond, but remained hunched as he was. His stomach still felt like it wanted to hurl itself over the bridge. He squinted at the man, who seemed familiar. His moustache was not curled immaculately as it should be, perhaps but drooped, and seemed sodden with some stale liquid.</p><p>“I know you. Inspector Javert,” the name was said with a slurred flourish. “You brought intelligence for us that night.” Javert did not need to be told of which night the man spoke. It was one of the soldiers from the National Guard. The one at the barricades Javert himself had been set loose from.</p><p>Ah, yes, set loose by another man in a uniform. The hairs on his head seemed to pull at his scalp at that thought’s intrusion. He realised a few seconds after that his hand had fisted in it to stave off the headache that had come. He tried to lift his head higher, and now stood, both palms flat against the parapet. One crutch had fallen to the floor, but he did not stoop to pick it up.</p><p>The soldier was speaking.</p><p>“He was my friend, you know, the leader,” the soldier said, then hiccupped.</p><p>“We went to school together. A friend. Of sorts.” The soldier’s voice caught on the last phrase, and he looked about to retch again. He held in his hands a bottle. Wine. Cheap wine. Javert was sure it was not the man’s first that night. Red-rimmed eyes turned to Javert, watery with the moon that now broke through the clouds.</p><p>“We both believed in France,” he said.</p><p>“He believed, I believed. But I joined the National Guard.” He paused now, mouth and brain trying to squeeze the next words into something coherent. Eventually it came out in a blubbered wheeze.</p><p>“How can two people believe in the same thing and yet fight on opposite sides?”</p><p>A look of renewed horror passed across the soldier’s face. He stared through Javert, at some distant point beyond his skull. “I shot him. And he clung to his flag of liberty and he didn’t even touch the floor. His Mother France did not claim him then.”</p><p>“I shot him,” the soldier—the boy, really, repeated. His eyes focused on Javert again, and he swallowed, then took another swig of his bottle. It seemed to fortify him, before he looked at the bottle again, and a strange smile wrung his features.</p><p>“You know, that other fellow, Grantaire,” he said, and did not wait for Javert to nod. “Always following him around with that bottle in his hand. He was shot too.” Another hiccup. “Stood beside Enjolras.”</p><p>“His name was Enjolras.</p><p>“But I didn’t shoot Grantaire. I shot Enjolras.</p><p>“And we believed in the same thing.</p><p>“But not in the same way.”</p><p>The hiccup turned into a sob.</p><p>“It is not enough to believe in the same thing, you see.”</p><p>And what had Javert believed in? Justice? Javert had believed in Justice. The other man, the false Mayor, had spoken of it. Chabouillet had carved Javert into her bosom, had let him form the weight in her scales.</p><p>“Brothers will kill brothers. He wasn’t even my brother. But I might have called him a friend.”</p><p>They would wet themselves: with blood; with piss on the stoop as they returned drunk and bludgeoned by carnage. With mud impossible to wash off.</p><p>“They should not send friends to kill friends. They should not send countrymen to kill countrymen, not when both are for Country. Though I supposed, it was that extra thing he believed in called Liberty which caused—” he broke off, and his hand was at his mouth again, muffling his cries.</p><p>Javert picked up his other crutch. It was not easy, but one hand remained fast on the ledge as he knelt down. He walked past the soldier, and stopped, then reached into his pocket and took out his handkerchief, proffering it to the man. He received a wane smile for thanks, to which he did not return. He trundled off.</p><p>That extra thing, thought Javert. That extra thing. What had the old man said? Mercy. He coughed, mouth still tasting of bile.</p><p>He did not realise he had reached his apartment till his hands, trembling, struck over and over a match that would not light. It broke, and fell to the floor. Light, he needed light. He dropped the rest of it and took another, struck it, fingers clenching desperately when it too failed to light at the first try. When the flame finally came, it stung his fingers before he could light the candle. He found himself huddling over the stick of wax, jaw grit so tight it might break. He dropped the match, and uttered a curse.</p><p>The next match he struck properly, and this time he held it steady over the candle. He set the match aside. The flames licked at his hands, but he did not flinch this time. It felt better than the memory of heaving waves, and a uniform that was too heavy.</p><p>At least in burning he would be purged— No, Javert thought. What a perfectly ridiculous notion. What complete nonsense—</p><p>He snatched his wrists away from the flame, but not before the smell of singed cloth reached his nostrils. He cursed again, and the word sounded wet against his teeth. His stomach clenched and unclenched, and his face hurt where the cheeks were pulled to the sides. He was laughing, he was laughing, and a strange dampness in his eyes broke their dam, tearing a path down his skin.</p>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Anything's that mended is but patched</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>~1823~</p><p>“I begin to fear your letters, Javert.” The curl of Chabouillet’s lips contained a sigh.</p><p>“Sir?”</p><p>“Now Paris has been mocked, by a commissaire on probation in some backwater town.” Chabouillet’s sigh could be contained no longer, and now it dribbled out as he fiddled with his cuff. Javert drew himself up, straighter, and stared at a point beyond his superior’s ear.</p><p>“Sir, I meant no offence.”</p><p>Chabouillet accorded Javert a look. “You are pleased by this result.”</p><p>“I am not. The convict escaped.”</p><p>“Nay, you are pleased that you were right.”</p><p>“Sir I—”</p><p>“I am pleased too, Javert.”</p><p>Javert’s eyes were shaken from their post at this, and darted to meet Chabouillet’s.</p><p>“Sir?”</p><p>Chabouillet smiled. It was not a warm smile, and cragged across his face like gravel. “It is vindicating,” said Chabouillet, "that I will not have to explain to my peers and betters my trust once again in a late hire who spent more time watching caught criminals than chasing them.”</p><p>Javert understood that M. Chabouillet was not seeking a reply, and so kept silent.</p><p>“You have asked for resignation, if dismissal cannot be had.” At this, Javert tilted his head down.</p><p>“Yes, sir.”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“He escaped my hands.”</p><p>“You wrote a letter to me, for the Prefecture, detailing your suspicions of the Mayor of M-Sur-M, did you not?”</p><p>“I did.”</p><p>“And we sent you a reply, did we not, that Valjean had been captured, that your suspicions were for naught. Paris sent no further men.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Where then, would the resources have been got, to capture that old convict?”</p><p>“Sir?”</p><p>Chabouillet accorded Javert another, more exasperated look.</p><p>“We will conduct an internal investigation. We will discover, likely, that the officer who took over the task of tracking Jean Valjean had in his haste, mistook. It would be an easy error to make, assuredly.</p><p>“You were outpaced by the convict. This is consistent with his profile. It would appear that the years had not affected his strength much. We will update the warnings in his file: that it would be wise to be armed when engaging him.” Chabouillet tapped at the shell of his ear as he spoke, and this time a more settled sigh issued from him. He picked up his pen again, but stopped at the shuffling he heard near Javert’s feet; from Javert’s feet.</p><p>The feet quickly stilled. Their owner spoke.</p><p>“At least,” said Javert, and his next words were muttered too soft for Chabouillet to hear. Almost. Perhaps.</p><p>“Demotion, Javert?”</p><p>Javert blanched, but quickly schooled his face before his next words came. “I was, as you said, on probation. It would not be demotion per se.” The man’s blank face looked almost hopeful.</p><p>“No, Javert. You have not heard my words these past few minutes. Your early promotion is justifiable. Moreso, now.”</p><p>“I cannot remain at my post, sir, surely.”</p><p>“That is not incorrect. We will recall you to Paris.” Ah.</p><p>“Yes, sir.”</p><p>“There is a small commissariat in need of supply. The previous commissaire has just been posted to Marseilles. You will proceed there, first as acting, and continue the probation tenure. Undoubtedly, you will be confirmed in due course. It is an hour yet before the order will be stamped, but you can collect your new uniforms on your way out.”</p><p>“Sir, I—”</p><p>“The scent has returned to Paris, Javert. Surely this should cheer you, after the trail went cold so long ago.”</p><p>“Sir—”</p><p>“Take it as training, Javert. Not punishment. Only the untrainable end up in chains, is it not so?” Chabouillet’s mouth quirked at his little joke, which was apparently lost on Javert. No matter. He waved the Inspector away, and Javert promptly bowed, and turned.</p><p>Chabouillet waited till Javert had left the room, then placed his pen back down, picked up the open letter resting at the side of this desk, and tore it into eight neat pieces. The pieces fell to the floor, where they stayed only to be swept by the cleaning boy a few hours later. The cleaning boy had been so hired because he knew how to mind his own business, and he did not notice who the letter had been signed off by.</p><p>Meanwhile, Javert set about locating a flat in Paris.</p><p>---</p><p>~1832~</p><p>“Monsieur.” Javert stood stiffly before M. Chabouillet. Stiffly, since he was propped upright by two crutches, one under each arm. He was not in uniform, and there was no reason to be. A bird twittered outside, perched as it was on the windowsill. It had one leg. Javert looked balefully at it as he shifted on his own (temporary, he reminded himself, temporary) perch. His fringe fell half across his forehead, and he resisted blowing it out of the way.</p><p>Chabouillet steepled his fingers as he considered Javert.</p><p>“Should you not be at home, resting, Javert?”</p><p>Javert had rested. Had rested, and rested, and when the desire to throw his cup against the window pane became too great, had decided that he would visit the Prefecture, orders to rest be damned.</p><p>So here he was, right beside Chabouillet. His superior’s chair: mahogany, dark, leather seat creaking, was placed at an angle out from an expansive desk, and Chabouillet sat within it.</p><p>The previous meeting had not gone as well. Two days after leaving the hospital, two nights after staring into ever dying candles, Javert had found himself in Chabouillet’s office, hanging on the two points of his crutches like a sodden log.</p><p>From the beginning, Chabouillet would not hear him, would not hear of him, would not see him etcetera. When he had managed to reach the office regardless, Chabouillet had pointed at some space between his brows only to say that if Javert so much as uttered the word “resignation”, he would instead be placed under arrest for desertion. Chabouillet’s finger, with a slight wag, made it clear that such a thing would not be an option.</p><p>Chabouillet was not unaccustomed to Javert’s requests. They were not infrequent. Chabouillet had wished, however, that Javert would not be this way, and Chabouillet had accordingly uttered this wish out loud with a great sigh in Javert’s direction.</p><p>Javert had then been directed home like an errant schoolboy. It would be better, Chabouillet said, for him to rest. His wages were cut for the interim with the requisite apologies, and Chabouillet would discuss matters with him further when he was ready. He had accepted the man’s authority then, for it was Chabouillet, and his orders had been proper. But that had been two weeks ago, and Javert <em>had</em> <em>rested</em>.</p><p>As he stood, shifting his weight to his right leg once more, for it was the better of the two, he wondered about Cuif. The night before he had quit the hospital, Cuif had brought a few items of clothing for Javert. He had told him then that he would aid him to his apartment. When he was ready, sir, he would just have to let Cuif know by way of a message and Cuif would—</p><p>Javert had chosen to ignore the man.</p><p>He had not seen Cuif since the hospital, nor had Cuif stopped by his abode. Nor, indeed, had he expected him to. It would not have done to have him delay that man’s rest, even when he was not scheduled to be at the station house. Rest did not come easy for inspectors or agents, this much Javert knew.</p><p>Rest was not easy.</p><p>“Sir, if you would, I should be employed in some manner, to—”</p><p>“To make up for your actions at the barricades? Or to make up for the letter?”</p><p>Javert felt a twinge in his neck at the words. Chabouillet’s tone was light, but he his smile was grim and his knuckles drummed themselves at the edge of his desk in a manner which belied darker emotions.</p><p>The letter. It was the letter Cuif had mentioned in his first conversation with Javert at the hospital. This had been part of the cause for his restlessness, as he sat in his chair, sipping aimlessly at coffee he knew was useless: for it only made his pulse race to exhaustion and turned his fingers cold. At first, he sent messages to the Prefecture asking to see Chabouillet, but Chabouillet’s replies had been short, insisting on him waiting till after he had recovered further. At Javert’s enquiry of the letter, Chabouillet’s reply was even shorter, and stated that Javert was to send no further messages till they met in person. Javert could not make the tone of Chabouillet’s last, though he had stared and reread it at least thirty times.</p><p>In the time had had not spent sitting aimlessly, or drinking coffee, or indeed watching the candlelight play on his walls or off the paper of letters reread, Javert had lain in bed, heard his porter move in the quarters below, heard doors open and slam through the building, and when he would get up those noises would swim and echo through the walls.</p><p>Even the thought of it now, as he stood before Chabouillet, made him want to scratch at his ears. He ran a fingernail over the side of his thumb to quell this notion, picking at dead, dry skin. It made the sound of the ticking hands of a clock.</p><p>“If you would tell me the contents, sir, I would—”</p><p>“Ah yes, the contents. You are a commissaire, are you not? Of Paris?”</p><p>“Yes—that is to say, I held that post last.”</p><p>“Then why, pray tell, after the barricades, did you see it fit to draw up a list of ‘improvements’ as it were, to the management of <em>prisoners</em>?”</p><p>Javert started. Prisons? He had written of— He had remembered Toulon, and starless skies, and a prisoner with a number he used in lieu of a name. But he could not recall what he had written. He could not even remember the act of penning the matter down. But if Chabouillet were to be believed, it had been of prisons.</p><p>The bird outside Chabouillet’s office had begun a quarrel with another. Flutters and chirps floated in and past a silent Javert.</p><p>“No, perhaps—” said Chabouillet, a palm raised. “Don’t answer that. You were not right in your mind. It is merely good that I received your letter, and not Gisquet. And must you continuously sign as Inspector? We have had this conversation before. You are above that post.” Chabouillet had risen now. “I did not decide to be your patron for nothing, Javert.”</p><p>He stepped up to Javert, and stopped short of clapping a hand to the other man’s shoulder. “Do not do this to me.”</p><p>Chabouillet continued. “It is just—” and Chabouillet waved his hand absently. “Coming this soon after the rebellion, one might construe that you intended leniency on caught instigators. That you would be sympathetic to insurgents, you understand. Surely you understand, I need not spell it out so fully for you.”</p><p>In any case, thought Javert, he was no longer in a position to make such a decision, and that was good.</p><p>“What was that?”</p><p>“Sir?” asked Javert, then blinked. He had spoken those thoughts aloud. He bowed hastily. “But it is true, monsieur, I am—suspended from duty.” He stopped, and looked at the motes dancing behind Chabouillet’s hair, such that he did not see the thinning lips and the look, almost sly, that crept into the wrinkles of Chabouillet’s face.</p><p>“Why have you been so anxious about the letter, Javert?”</p><p>Javert frowned at a particularly mischievous cluster of motes swooping about a stray lock resting on Chabouillet’s ear, which in turn was moving swiftly past Javert. He swallowed, but still did not answer Chabouillet, who had crossed behind Javert, and reached around him with an arm pointed at a half-bent piece of paper lying near the middle of Chabouillet’s desk.</p><p>“You may see for yourself.”</p><p>Javert’s eye twitched. He watched as the arm snaking past him reached out even further, till in contact with the paper, and that paper slid across the desk as Chabouillet pushed the message, unfolded, bits of its seal peeking over the top, towards Javert, then gave it a final tap before removing his fingers. Javert leaned forward and took it up, then folded it against his side and placed it in his coat pocket without reading it. The thing rustled.</p><p>His letter.</p><p>“Did you think you had written yet another resignation? Yes, one supposes that would not be unlike you. They tend to be the first words out of your mouth to me.” Chabouillet muttered then to himself something about “thank heavens only to me” but Javert did not catch it.</p><p>“I—I did not remember what I had written, sir.” He chose his next words carefully. “If I had said anything to discredit or disgrace my office—”</p><p>He swallowed.</p><p>“I would resign. Entirely.” As a commissaire. As an inspector. He gestured at his legs. It would be appropriate.</p><p>“You are dead, anyway.”</p><p>And in a flutter of those words, it seemed the birds’ quarrel outside had, too, stopped.</p><p>“Sir?”</p><p>“We published your obituary in the papers.”</p><p>Javert blanched.</p><p>Chabouillet waved dismissively, as he returned to his seat. “Vidocq suggested it, after Cuif’s information. We wanted to draw out the last dregs of the Patron-Minette and their associates. We have mostly succeeded. Only Montparnasse eludes our detection.”</p><p>“Sir.”</p><p>Chabouillet considered Javert again. “I suppose Cuif did not tell you.” The man hmm-ed.</p><p>“You are not fit for service at this present moment, in any case,” mused Chabouillet. He leaned back in his chair, and the dust motes wavered impatiently as he pushed into them. “But we need men. We are still dealing with the chaos of the Parisian streets, and if the cholera threatens to surge again Gisquet will throw a fit. Gisquet as it were—well—</p><p>“But speak no more of resignation to me.”</p><p>Resignation. He had tried. He had looked to the heavens which were black and which whispered <em>yield</em>, and he had tried to offer another sort of resignation then, to Justice, perhaps, or the one who sat in Throne of Judgement, that other superior that was not Gisquet. Yes. He had done this to superiors time and time again, and each time he had been rejected, by man, by the cosmos. It was all one. Resignation was, he supposed, a door which would not open to him.  </p><p>Ah, yes. Resignations. Always denied. Always, snatched away by Chabouillet before they could reach the Prefect himself. In the past year, he had done the same after a month of failing to solve another case before the matter was passed to Vidocq’s agents to look into. And he had tried (resigning, that is), had he not, after M-Sur-M? But Chabouillet had insisted on posting him to Paris. He shook his head. Before that, with Madelei— with the mayor, a mayor whose coat he had seen again before him, floating in a space beyond a parapet, who he could have touched had he reached but an inch further—</p><p>He would not think of that.</p><p>He brought himself back to the room, to Chabouillet’s expectant face.</p><p>“How then might I be occupied?” Javert was able to ask this without his lips stumbling. If he could be useful—Javert thought, it might suffice. It might stop the gnawing in his gut that had followed him from his flat, through the carriage ride here, and persisted even in Chabouillet’s office. </p><p>The question seemed amenable to Chabouillet, who nodded.</p><p>Motes floated in front of Chabouillet’s brows, and as Javert followed their path he tried to concentrate on what Chabouillet was saying. “The station house in the 14<sup>th</sup> arrondissement,” said Chabouillet. “The main sergent-de-ville there is indisposed, and they have lost men to barricades. We have had to shift men around. Gisquet would rather have more men on the streets, but there is paperwork. And you can write.”</p><p>“I understand.”</p><p>“Your pay will be little. You understand? Because you hold no other duties. Just minor clerking tasks.”</p><p>“I understand.” He had savings. By his own calculations, there was more than sufficient for his needs. There would be the matter of finding fresh accommodation. His current residence was too big, too spacious, rented at the behest of Chabouillet just recently. Officers who were administrators needed a place to host their peers, he had said. It was good form.</p><p>There was no longer a need for such form. He would not take the position of commissaire again if it was afforded him, he—he had decided. He thought of the study, the dining hall, various almanacs which lined the shelves, the guest room which had never been used. No more of that. Simple quarters, simple matters.</p><p>He had hands, and he would work. For now.</p><p>And he would measure his expenses such that when he could no longer work, he would not be found destitute. The time for that might come sooner than later, he realised, as he bowed to Chabouillet once more.</p><p>As Javert raised himself, he saw Chabouillet tapping his pen on the edge of his desk. The man seemed to want to say more, from the way his lips pursed and thinned alternately. Chabouillet began twisting one end of his moustache as he stared at the table-top, half muttering to himself. “God forbid I have to supplicate more diva commissaires, with Gisquet breathing about like an impotent caged bull. I shall be glad to quit this post, I have lasted this long, I have done this much, it is no longer worth the hassle…”</p><p>"Sir?”</p><p>“You,” said Chabouillet, and his eyes narrowed further as he scanned Javert from top to bottom, and began muttering again. Javert picked out the words “cholera” and “continues” and “goddamned students” and even “damn it all”. Chabouillet looked suddenly afflicted. The pen stopped tapping. Distantly, Javert mused if Chabouillet did in fact think of Javert as a sort of plague, or a disease. It was understandable.</p><p>There was a joke in there somewhere, if Javert were the type to make them.</p><p>“You will report, beginning tomorrow, and paid by the hour in daily wages. They will tell you when you need to show,” said Chabouillet.</p><p>“I understand.” Javert bowed and made to leave.</p><p>“And try not to let yourself take on a case, Javert,” called out Chabouillet. Javert turned. Chabouillet smiled as if a gun pressed into his spine was forcing him to. “We do not need to chase after crippled policemen.”</p><p>“I would not, Monsieur le Chef,” said Javert. He did not try to bow again, though his head angled slightly in deference. He began taking steps out of the office.</p><p>Chabouillet’s gaze followed him as he passed through the doorway, and Javert felt the picking at his thumb again. He stilled his fingers against the bars of his crutch. The skin at the side of his thumb felt raw.</p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. No darkness but ignorance</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Sir!”</p><p>Javert turned just in time to see Cuif skitter to a halt just in front of him. He refrained from frowning beyond his usual sternness, not when the younger officer seemed so out of breath. It would not do to discourage subordinates so. It was not good policy. Though to be fair, Cuif was no longer under his command. This fact, once thought, did indeed cause the ridges in Javert’s brow to deepen a fraction further. Cuif noticed, and drew back ever so slightly.</p><p>“What is it, Cuif?”</p><p>“I—ah—” Cuif was rubbing the back of his neck again, a sign of his nervousness, and here Javert grew suspicious.</p><p>“Have you begun to patrol this district too?” Javert queried, voice flat as a calm sea. He stood at the front door of the station house, crutches pinned under his armpits, in shirt, vest, jacket, trousers, and a black top hat. Not, he reminded himself the same way he had the past week as he reached for his clothes each morning, a uniform.</p><p>“It—ah,” Cuif stumbled over his words. “There are overlaps with the 5<sup>th</sup>, sir.” It was not the first time since his, and here Javert winced at the words, his current assignment, that he had encountered Cuif again. He supposed then, as he supposed now, that listening to man was fair repayment for having failed to inform him that he would be leaving the hospital early.</p><p>“You, you mentioned you were looking for new—ah, lodgings. Sir.” Had he told Cuif? He lived in the 6<sup>th</sup> arrondissement, and while it was close enough to the station house, it was no longer required.</p><p>The Prefect had wanted his commissaires in lodgings that were suitable for entertaining at least the rich merchants, and not all cases could be taken at the station house. This much was true, and so Javert had obeyed, had taken up an apartment along a goodly enough street, a flat on the second floor with shutters, a dining room, a kitchen and garret, and two rooms: one a study, the other a bedroom. It was no longer required, and though Javert had enough to continue living there for at least the next few years, he had no desire to do so.</p><p>He should never have agreed to be a commissaire. That was where the trouble had begun, he mused, back in M-Sur-M, with that first posting. The thought of M-Sur-M hurt his head, and so Javert worked to brush it away. His hands mirrored his mind, and he swept at the sides of his trousers some invisible dust. </p><p>Cuif’s voice brought him back to the present. “Was I mistaken, sir?”</p><p>“No, Cuif, but what is it to you?”</p><p>Though he supposed, being a CP had brought him men such as Cuif, who endured despite the looks of dirt they received from common folk in the street, because they wore no uniform, fought in no wars, and spied on everyone (so said common knowledge in the form of many street oracles: mud scratched hags in tattered shawls, baring rotting teeth). Not that men in uniform were looked on with any particular favour. What of it? Nothing of it. Javert’s days of late had been full of nothings.</p><p>But— there was that woman, just come in yesterday, as she had almost daily, they said, for the past two months, still pleading about her son’s dead body. He had been of the National Guard, but his body had not been returned to the family. At least—at least, that was what she had said. There was the possibility that she was hysterical, still mad with grief. Such things happened. Not that Javert would have been the one to look into it. Javert had merely heard as such, on a day last winter that he had delivered a report to the newly instated Prefect. He could not recall who had mentioned it.</p><p>No matter. </p><p>“It is just,” said Cuif, interrupting Javert’s thoughts once more, “I happened to pass by in the 14<sup>th</sup>, and I noticed a place, and a gentleman who might be interested in letting his apartment.” Cuif’s words were too smooth, too rehearsed, pricking again at Javert’s suspicions. His lips pursed.</p><p>“You mean to say, Cuif,” he said slowly, “that you enquired for me?”</p><p>Cuif had the temerity to stammer out, as a pink flush spread along his cheekbones, “No! I mean—I mean, I was just walking—”</p><p>Javert waved the apology away, as much as the shrug of his shoulders could convey that.</p><p>“Anyway, here,” said Cuif. He held out a piece of paper to Javert. “This is the address. The gentleman says to speak with the porter, as he is often away on business, and indeed, was just passing when I met him. A bachelor, some kind of merchant, I think. He is agreeable to renting out a few rooms within it, as he has other property, so he told me. I had chanced through the area a few times after. I spotted no ill elements.” Cuif’s face still harboured some pink as he spoke, adding an unsaid confession that he had indeed, somehow in his own time, sought possible residence for Javert, and had indeed, gone so far as to search within walking distance to the station house Javert was clerking at.</p><p>Javert himself had buried himself in the mess that was the paperwork of the 14<sup>th</sup> arrondissement station house, and had not bothered to call on houses.</p><p>“It is only fair, sir, you once helped me find the same,” Cuif was saying. But that had not been the same. He had merely known of appropriate lodgings for a man receiving agent’s wages a few tenements down, not long after he had taken Cuif on at Chabouillet’s behest. That had been easy circumstance, for Javert had traversed many streets in Paris for two years prior to Cuif’s appearance, knowing them better than the back of his hand.</p><p>“Thank you, Cuif.” He took the proffered note, and gripped it in his hand as he proceeded back into the station house, and on sitting, thrust it into his pocket. His temple began to throb.</p><p>The day yawned long, though the station house might as well have been a madhouse. Complaints flew, and he watched words volley back and forth across the main room though he could not participate in any such match. His legs itched.</p><p>Yet too soon, the last paper to be sorted slipped in front of him, and was filed, and was done. He drummed his fingers on his desk. Surely, when he had arrived, there was a stack enough to occupy him a month. He looked about him. Apparently not. Well. The commissaire under whose purview this station house came had told him it was by an as needed basis, though he was to report each morning. But Javert was being paid hourly, and it would not be fair if he stayed beyond those hours, earning for nothing.</p><p>He placed his hands in his pockets, leaning to push against the desk with his shoulders as he shuffled upright. His fingers touched the folder edges of paper. Ah yes, the note. He took it out, read it. He knew the street written there. It was not too far a walk from here. He pulled a bit at the tips of hair made a quick decision, and got up, and walked over to one of the sergeants.</p><p>“I have finished my tasks. I will leave. Please note the hour.”</p><p>The boy stuttered out a response Javert was not bothered enough to fully comprehend. Still, the boy’s tone told Javert enough. He was no longer a commissaire, no longer an inspector, yet the name of “Javert” seemed to travel far, and stick in the moulded grapevines of policeman chatter. There was hardly reason for it, he thought to himself, as he nodded and turned out the door and into the midday sun. It was cold, the autumn chill fast setting in, and as Javert began walking he nudged his jaw into his coat’s upturned collar, moving through the streets like a tugged hulk.</p><p>The walk took him longer than he had anticipated. By the time he reached No.3, Rue de l’Ouest, he was tired, and the muscles in his calves ached. He knocked on the door, and a surly faced man appeared. The man gruffly asked him his business. Javert said he had been directed here, that a Monsieur Ultime wished to let, and that he presumed the main landlord was agreeable to such matters. The price of 60 francs a year for part of the rooms.</p><p>The porter grunted again and directed him into the stairwell. He pointed upwards. “Third floor,” he said. Javert grimaced at the flight of stairs, but grit his teeth, and climbed. The porter did not attempt to aid him, but nevertheless walked respectfully enough behind as Javert made his way up.</p><p>At the door, the porter moved forward and unlocked it, again keeping respectful distance.</p><p>There were three doors within, though all but one remained closed. The small antechamber seemed to serve both as a sitting and dining area. One of the doors facing Javert led to a kitchen. Javert noted, too, the tin bath and washstand which stood in the kitchen, and alcove like space it had, complete with a folding bed and a chest for clothes. The other open door seemed to lead to a room, sparsely furnished with a bed and small dresser. The shut door he assumed locked, and did not try the handle. </p><p>“This is more than enough,” said Javert. "I have no need beyond the kitchen." </p><p>The porter grunted. “Monsieur Ultime says you are to have this bedroom as well,” he said, and detached a set of keys from his belt. He held them out to Javert, who did not take them. Javert looked about the rooms again, tapping an unsure finger on the edge of his crutch.</p><p>“Perhaps Monsieur Ultime has undercharged,” said Javert.</p><p>The porter shrugged. “You can tell him when he comes. Maybe on the weekend. But you must pay for this week should you want to move in. Do you?”</p><p>Javert hmm-ed into his coat as he turned to the porter. In truth, there was little to complain about, if he were even the type to do so. Cuif had selected well, it was not so far a distance from the station house, was more than affordable, and Javert suddenly felt very, utterly tired. The thought of having to walk the streets to search for other accommodation, when one had already presented itself, did not bear favourably in his mind. To go that effort only to acquire more choices he had to eliminate—No. No. He had always preferred singular conclusions.</p><p>He nodded stiffly to the porter and pulled the requisite money out.</p><p>“I will move in today,” he said.</p><p>“Good, good,” nodded the porter, his gruff voice mellowing a touch. “You need anything, you just tell Jean.”</p><p>Javert almost dropped the money, his hand quickly recovering itself.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Jean,” said the porter, pointing at himself.</p><p>“Ah, yes,” said Javert, though he had to work to contain a flinch. It seemed the name would not leave him easily. Jean was such a common name. It should not have been attached to such a singularly uncommon man.</p><p>--</p><p>Jean the porter was a man of little words and equally little appearance. After that first day, Javert hardly saw him. For three weeks, the hull that was Javert’s top hat moved with regularity out of the building’s threshold every morning, floating the same path to the 14<sup>th</sup> arrondissement’s station house. It would similarly float back each day, though with less regularity, sometimes when the sun was still high in the sky, and other days when the brightness flagged much lower, and the hat less buoyed as it was, perched on its owner’s head. Javert, underneath, left no ripples in his wake.</p><p>The streets had stopped recognising him.</p><p>Only the station house seemed to remember the man as not-just-a-clerk. So it was that when Mme. Perrin entered on such and such a week, undeterred by the young <em>sergeant-de-ville</em> who tried to divert her elsewhere, she looked at expectantly at the grey, shadowed man who heaved himself from his table of littered papers, and moved slowly towards her, for here was some sort of officer.  </p><p>She had not noticed this one before, but he stood like a statue, and was quite large. Towering over her with his shadow cast to the floor, he perhaps looked bigger than he actually was. In any case, he filled the space, and this prevented her usual wails from starting.</p><p>“Madame, if you would follow me.”</p><p>“Monsieur?” she asked. “Have you word of what they did with my son?”</p><p>“Madame, you have asked this question near every day, at this hour, for all the time I have sat here.”</p><p>There seemed to be a shift in the air, and Mme. Perrin looked about at the other policemen, but they seemed intent on concentrating on their own work. She looked up again. The man she addressed looked down, and ran a hand roughly through the fringe which spilled over his eyes, pulling them somewhat to rest back on his head. His beard twitched to the side, and he tapped his cane twice on the floor.</p><p>“But know you where he is?”</p><p>“Yes,” the man replied, but held up a hand before she could enquire. “But you must show me.” Mme. Perrin tilted her face quizzically to the side. The man inclined his head, mirroring her, then and motioned for her to step out. “If you would, Mme. Perrin.” Mme. Perrin did so, shakily. What was she to show? Paris was bustling, but there was a cold wind which shot just past the door, for already it was mid-September. Mme. Perrin wrapped her shawl tighter about her. The man, having followed her out, was hailing a cab.</p><p>“Why hail you the cab?” she asked, fearful.</p><p>“For you to show me your son,” answered the man. “I am with the police. I will not cause harm.” Mme. Perrin did not hear the scoff of a passer-by at those words, and the man himself seemed to ignore it. “It is faster this way, that is all. I do not think you would wish to walk. I can leave directions with the driver.”</p><p>A strange chill washed over Mme. Perrin anew. “No. No, you are to come with me. I will not ride in this carriage alone.”</p><p>The man nodded. “Very well,” he said. They entered the carriage, but not before he spoke a few words to the driver.</p><p>“You say you know about my son?” she asked again once the cab had started moving. He nodded tightly, and sank his chin into the collar of his coat with folded arms and did not say much more. She noticed only then the silver head of his cane. She had not noticed his limp before.</p><p>“Madame,” said the man. “You know about your son. I have seen you speaking to him.”</p><p>The cab drew up at a gated entrance along Rue Émile Richard, a small one. The man got down first, paid the cab, and helped her out, but did not hold her hand longer than was necessary. The stones were familiar. “Have they been keeping him here?” she asked. The man did not reply, only walked along the wall. The place was a strange sort of garden, overrun with mounds of dirt. “Monsieur! I demand—” she hurried after him.</p><p>“Your son has been dead for more than three months, madame,” he said quietly. He had stopped near a shaded patch of grass. And here Mme. Perrin stopped short. There was a tombstone there, simple, and quite new. And the name on it read Jean-Andre Perrin. “You buried him a week after his death.”</p><p>“No—I—”</p><p>“And you have been at the station almost daily since a week after. You will come here after that. You will come right here and speak. See, there, your shoe’s imprint from last night.”</p><p>“No,” she whispered again.</p><p>“This is the truth, madame,” said the man, and the lowness of his voice steadied her more than the arm she had gripped (his, she realised distantly).</p><p>“I forget—” she said, choked, though no tears streamed down her face. “I forget and I remember, each day anew. There is none at home to tell me otherwise.” She felt the man beside him shift. Perhaps he had nodded. She could not tell for her vision had blurred. Something pressed into her hand. It was a piece of cloth, a handkerchief. Hers? She must have dropped it, though she did not remember drawing it out. She sniffled her thanks and pressed it to her cheeks, dabbing at the tears.</p><p>Between hiccups, she continued. “I know it is a façade, but I wish I did not. I will not go by the station house concerning this matter again, Inspector.”</p><p>“I am no Inspector,” came the reply, but Mme. Perrin did not dwell on the oddness of tone, only nodded like a corrected child.</p><p>“Of course, monsieur.”</p><p>“I can arrange for a cab to send you back home. It will be waiting at the same entrance when you are ready.” She let go of the arm then, and bent to smooth her hand over the top of the gravestone. The motion of her hand mimed out the shape of a head, it would not be hard to imagine that she was, in fact, pushing soft curls behind the ear of a small boy.</p><p>"There is no need," she said. "I know the way."</p><p>The man was stepping away, and walking back down the path, the small thump of the cane tapping out a beat between footfalls. She turned to him.</p><p>“Thank you monsieur,” Mme. Perrin said. He did not turn back to her, but lowered his head and drew his coat further about him with his free hand.</p><p>“Offer me no thanks, madame,” said Javert, and departed, going the same way he came. In the distance, he saw a burial just over, the clergyman’s robe billowing slightly in the wind. As his own hair blew about his ears, he realised he had left his hat at the station, and lowered his face deeper yet into his collar, till his nose barely peeked over the cloth.</p><p>He thought little about the name he had seen on the tombstone. He especially did not note (so he told himself) that the person buried there was yet another Jean. He thought even less of such silvery lies his mind was weaving day in, day out.</p><p>No matter.</p>
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<a name="section0008"><h2>8. A cypress, not a bosom, hides my heart</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jean Valjean had waited, as he said he would. After delivering Marius, he had returned to Rue de l'Homme armé, to wait. But Javert never came. A week in, then two, and the only callers were Cosette, who had taken a room at Pontmercy’s, and Toussaint, who had followed her at Valjean’s request.</p><p>The nights grew long and old.</p><p>In the day, Valjean traversed the streets once they were safe again, walking with Marius and Cosette, half looking over his shoulder each time. Nerves, something like it, buzzed between his eyes in strange anticipation. This time, it was not to seek a quick nook or cranny to rush to as a hunted rabbit would. No, it was to seek the face of a man who would remove the burden of his name from him once more.  </p><p>Jean Valjean. Such a name had been easier to bear in silence, when he knew at least one other in this world knew of it, when he knew that this one other sought it.</p><p>The years had passed with the phantom of Javert lingering under every top-hat and uniform. Now they no longer did, and this quelled his nerves even less. The police passed him in the street and nodded, and did not scrutinise his face. Jean Valjean was not a name on their minds as it had been on one of their own (who hadn’t showed. Why hadn’t he showed?). Instead of feeling the weight of that imagined, awaited stare lifting off him, Valjean felt again the chains about his ankles, dragging each step.</p><p>It had been easy to pretend to be another. He had thought it hardship, then, seeking cover under every stone. He knew now that this was not so, as the promise of being found began to elude him.</p><p>Each night he returned to the flat, each night he waited on his bed, till the material of that couch scratched against him, made lying down unbearable. Nightly, he would sit up to moonlight and bury his head in his hands. He did not afford himself the luxury of candlelight in those moments, though the name Jean Valjean grew and loomed in his mind, and threatened to consume him.</p><p>Increasingly, he refused to enter the threshold of happiness which housed Cosette and the Pontmercy boy. Increasingly, he felt like he would sully it, and so would depart at the door after such and such a walk, and disappear into the crowd once more. Valjean’s feet would slow with every turn, till at times, he barely moved forward at all, caught by a reflection of himself in this pool, in that window, unknown and unaccounted for.</p><p>Valjean was tired of running.</p><p>Soon, soon, Javert would arrive, and do his duty. He would wait for Javert. Javert would come, and he would be Jean Valjean once more. No more Fauchelevent, no more Madeleine, or Fabre, or the beggar who gave alms in a silly yellowed greatcoat. Just Jean Valjean. Some nights, he whispered the name to himself before he slept, just to be sure it still existed. Perhaps the sound would carry itself out the window and light on Javert, and the policeman would remember, and call. He did not return to Rue Plumet for this reason. He remained because he had told Javert of this address.</p><p>But each time he answered the door it was once again Cosette. A light, a true light. But the shadows grew starker with the sunny rays she cast, and Valjean knew that this lantern was one which would float away from him soon.</p><p>He waited. He waited till the burden of Jean Valjean grew too great, till he decided it was a monster he could not let mar the mortar of the house Marius Pontmercy was to build for—with Cosette. For her sake, yes, he would leave. Again, for her, he would bury himself away. This time, he would have to trust that Javert would find him anyway, as he tended to, as he had before.</p><p>He went to the convent.</p><p>There, the nights continued, dark and unrevealing through the multitude of candles, the hours drawing lines in the skin under his eyes and about his mouth, and still Javert did not show.</p><p>--</p><p>It would soon be winter. This much, Jean the porter knew, and said as much to all who passed him by in the tenement. This, he repeated, as he nodded affirmation at Javert’s appearance in the main doorway.</p><p>Cold air nipped busily down the hallway in a last bid to stick fast before Javert nudged the door fully shut with his shoulder, even as Jean the porter muttered something about the day being busy, a development he did not seem entirely pleased by.</p><p>Javert, whose day had been painfully absent of business, did not pause to inspect the meaning of Jean’s words. He scratched absently at his neck with the brim of his hat as he took it off, and fiddled with his collar as he went cane then foot then foot up the first three stairs, and proceeded in that manner the rest of the flight. Jean, Jean, Jean.</p><p>Voilà, Jean.</p><p>Javert’s coat collar crumpled in his hand. He gaped at the man at his door who stood with hand still raised, about to knock. The knuckles made no noise as they lowered.</p><p>“You.”</p><p>His mouth snapped shut, molars clicking as he considered the apparition before him. The apparition stood in a yellow coat: large and ugly, the occupant sunken in somewhat. He had seen one just like it a few months back, an age ago, in a time when Javert donned a uniform which represented law and order, in a time when he had not been quite so declawed.</p><p>Then he noticed the keys the apparition had in his other hand, and his gaze narrowed. Already, Javert felt a strange picking, a scrabbling, somewhat caught between his chest and his throat, like a half-healed scab coming loose. His voice took on a new hiss. “You are Ultime?”</p><p>“Ultime Fauchelevent, yes. They know me as Ultime here,” came the unmistakable voice, from the too familiar face. Not a ghost: a man. Unfortunately so. Jean was such a common name.</p><p>“It was you,” said Javert.</p><p>“Yes.” The man took off his hat, held it between both his hands. The keys jangled as he did so.</p><p>“You told Cuif. You asked him.”</p><p>“I—yes. We met in the street, in passing I—”</p><p>“Such coincidence!” A strange waver crept into Javert’s voice, and it turned high and strangled. “You bluff. I know you—of old.” The man only looked back, no retort sounding.</p><p>“Had you met him before this? Did you follow him?” When the man did not deny it, Javert’s chin seized. His head heaved sideways, half muttering to himself.</p><p>“Monsieur, yet why? What more have you to do with me?” asked Javert. The man looked struck. Javert continued, the same half-mutter, “Yet nothing made known, yet another cover. No, no, that is not right. That is not—” he stepped closer, trying to get a closer look at the man. “That is not you either. I had seen—” His voice taut, Javert’s eyes flit over a worn face, seeing trembling, half-smiled lips and wet eyes.</p><p>“I am sorry, I was not sure you would agree if I had—”</p><p><em>Ah hah</em>. “Yes, that is exactly it. A—a dissembling. A lie, yet another. <em>Pah!</em> And we are not rid of them. They haunt.” He looked up suddenly. “I know you no longer.” Javert’s laugh rung hollow in his own ears.</p><p>He moved as one blinkered, felt rather than saw the keyhole. The echo of a name (his?) clattered with his own keys as he knocked past the man, then fumbled with the door. With effort, it opened.</p><p>“Cuif said you were in need.”</p><p>It seemed at first, that the man’s words had gone unheard, and so the man appeared surprised when Javert’s muttering began anew. “Damn what Cuif said. Who are you to me and I to you and—” Javert raised an arm to brush away the hand which touched his shoulder, and found himself clutching at the lapels of the man’s overcoat, almost leaning into him. His legs buckled, for he had taken his other hand off his cane. He had not heard it fall.</p><p>“Nothing.” Javert all but whispered, eyes wide. “Nothing at all.” A hand that was not his reached towards him. Javert jerked away, but he had not released his hold on the man, and so the man tripped after him, bringing them even closer together. The man’s hand lay at Javert’s neck, over the cloth and utterly too warm.</p><p>“You cannot tell me you feel nothing,” said the man called Ultime Fauchelevent. And what did that man feel there, thumb as such just under Javert’s jaw? Did the man feel Javert’s pulse, the race of blood that crashed like empty waves through his throat? The madness that threatened to bubble, too? Javert shook his head. There was nothing to be felt. Nothing. His business was nothing and his nights were naught. Nothing.</p><p>The man spoke again. “You cannot tell me that—”</p><p>“I tell you that I do,” Javert said, and stepped back, feeling for the wall. He needed to get away. This plane was not hell, assuredly, for this <em>good </em>man was in it, but it was wretched, nonetheless. Javert needed air, water, light. Ultime grasped his wrist, held it in a vice. Leashed as he was to the strange spectre in front of him, Javert moved as a drunk man, staggering unsuccessfully away.</p><p>Javert pulled against the man, but the man only held on the tighter, hand closed around Javert’s wrist like a manacle. A withered man with eyes sunken such as this one should not still be so strong, thought Javert. Perhaps it was the darkness of the threshold, or the way the sunlight cant its rays in that made the man, though he looked healthier than he had been in hospital, even more drawn than before. The uncanniness caused Javert to jerk again at his wrist, to no effect.</p><p>Yet for all his strength, it seemed like Ultime quaked as he stepped closer to Javert. It seemed that it was not just the man who shuddered, but the whole entranceway. Javert stood, backed against the wall, breathing thunder and terror.</p><p>“Then,” said the man, voice low and pained, “A deal, Javert, a deal.” A deal. This was familiar ground, and yet it shook. This, Javert no longer understood. “This is not charity. I need a man to watch my property. Monsieur Jean should not bear that burden alone.”</p><p>Something ignited in the space behind Javert’s eyes at the words, and he blinked as a man steeled behind a cannon just fired. A spark of understanding seemed to catch, seemed to fan and grow, and burn.</p><p>He blinked again. “You need,” he bit out. “A man to watch your property.” Javert seethed, the words still hot between his ears.</p><p>“You need, Monsieur Ultime Fauchelevent—”</p><p>“Do not call me that, Javert, please.”</p><p>“—a guard?”</p><p>Javert’s face ripped into a snarl. Ultime’s eyes fluttered shut, and he looked like someone had struck him across the face. Hideously, Javert thought he might have liked to do just that. It might have offset the sting of that other rip inside him, of a scab within his chest finally tearing free.</p><p>“A watchdog, perhaps?”</p><p>He had said something like that before. The memory licked cold and stark in his mind. He would not shiver, he would not. “You would coral me in your lodgings like—like a kept thing?”</p><p>“I will not let you—I do not know you.” He stopped, and his tongue fell, useless, against his teeth.</p><p>The man who held his wrist was speaking. “You said, Javert, you spoke of—the gardener—the tree pruner, will you not learn to know him instead?”</p><p>Once, there had been a seed planted, watered. A root which took place in the cavity under his ribcage. It had grown in the span of a few months, till he could no longer deny its presence. The gardener was Madelei— the gardener was— the gardener had tilled, had dug the empty soil and placed that tiny thing in the ground’s hollow. He had wished for the tree-pruner, but a strange man had entered the garden one night and took a hatchet to this thing that lived within him. There was a man in a green jacket, who planted a seed between Javert’s ribs, and let it grow into a thing he could have called Feeling, and hacked down the shrub which sprung. It had not been a pruning, but neither had it been total annihilation. The splinters were too large to be called so. So, he had turned it into a locked desk, a casket, and buried it deep in the folds of his lungs, packed and weighed down till it had hardened to stone.</p><p>But now, without consent. Again, without consent, a tendril had attached itself to that fossilised tree, and was pushing its way though, splitting the surface, the very core, and he found there that the sap still flowed, though slow and viscous like pus. And as that rock cracked, there was feeling.</p><p>No longer insensate, Javert felt, and what he felt was pain.</p><p>Pain carved a rivulet from his chest, past the round of his shoulder and into the centre of his palm. There it branched five ways, to each digit, sinking into the riverbeds that were his nails. And it was this pain, for yes, he would admit it was pain, he would admit this much, that gave him strength enough to wrench his hand away from— from Ultime Fauchelevent.</p><p>He stepped back. He shut the door.</p><p>And outside, he still heard Ultime Fauchelevent knocking: against his head, it seemed, for his head rested against the door. In fact, his whole back pressed against it. He knew Fauchelevent had the key, in any case, he had the key, and still he knocked. Javert stumbled, not hearing how loud his footfalls were against wood, desperate only to get away from the voice that called, that despite the name he used now, was Jean Valjean’s voice, was Madeleine’s. But the knocks grew greater and louder, and in truth, they seemed to knock inside Javert, in the little spaces at his breastbone. His stumbling brought him to the inner room, and he shut himself in there.</p><p>“Go away,” he said, shoving shoulders and palms into the door to barricade it, as if he bore its weight and not the other way around. “Go away, I say.” The words slanted towards the floorboards as he said them, slipping under the cracks of the door.</p><p>“Let me in. Please.” The words were soft, and insidious, and they cut through the two layers of wood easily. Let me in. Let me in.</p><p>But he had, hadn’t he? Therein lay the rub. The chafe: of rope against his neck, about his wrists, knotting finally about that thing that beat, and beat, and beat a drum to the sort of battles he shied away from. What was it called? Ah yes. A heart.</p><p>--</p><p>~1823~</p><p>Oh, it had been hopeless from the start.</p><p>He had known that, and had persisted in that strange bet—and he had not been a betting man. He had not even known it was a gamble till too many cards were laid bare.  </p><p>Javert in the street, Javert at his door. There, seeing straight through him, piecing together, as one: the Jean Valjean who no longer was, and the man crouched knee deep in mud with the press of a cart still biting into his shoulder. He would not fight, he had told himself as he approached the maire and the policeman—who was shivering.</p><p>Thus, had Javert disarmed him. Not with weapons. No, not such paltry cudgels. Only a shiver which Madeleine had tried to brush aside in annoyance but clung to him. A shiver he had not thought he would notice, until it was all he saw.</p><p>Javert, the honest, Javert the strange penitent who owed a lying mayor no apology (who owed Valjean <em>every</em> apology, came the biting thoughts riding on the wind’s chill). A Javert who was shivering. An offer of hospitality had been made, as was Madeleine’s way, but he had not been able to walk quite so smoothly as he led the way into his house, not sure if the feeling at the base of his spine was the sort a man might feel at gunpoint, or something else.</p><p>Madeleine, as he turned this feeling over and over, found he could not blame the day’s length, neither the cart and the strength that sapped from him, nor the fear which had gnawed at him even as he passed the rest of the day with courteous smiles and grace.</p><p>Javert had been miserable, and like the smiling, almost skittish Javert of that morning, this was a new thing. It should have been a new thing either way, for what did Madeleine know of that younger prison guard? Madeleine had no such memories of a man whose hair would lie flat against his face, pressed under his cap as he glowered at each convict. Madeleine could not have known that this guard, unlike the others, did not often raise his voice when giving orders. Madeleine had only just met Javert, whose name one Jean Valjean remembered, because the same Jean Valjean had, without knowing how, managed to goad him into bellowing his name, the very day he left Toulon.</p><p>Jean Valjean’s Javert was not this man: this strange, honest Javert. Out of uniform. Yes, that was it. He looked different out of uniform. Madeleine purposed that he would build relations with this new Javert. Javert was not a common name, it was difficult to separate the two he knew, but he would try anyway. Perhaps in this way, he would make Javert forget the ghost of Jean Valjean as well. Perhaps in knowing the new Javert, Jean Valjean would recede into obscurity for them both.</p><p>Yes, and they would both be safe. Madeleine would be safe. These were Madeleine’s thoughts, even as he played with fire, knowing the match would finish too soon, burning one’s fingers, and that in any case, matches were no defence against the searing winter’s cold.</p><p>But in the meantime, the flame breathed away a chill that Madeleine had not realised surrounded him till it left. Briefly, it felt like relief. Any minute now, he knew, the trap would close about his ankle, metal jaws snapping and crushing the longing that had bloomed so suddenly in Madeleine. Longing—for that thing which lingered barely out of reach, flitting ever closer in the firelight which danced across Javert’s face, alighting on the policeman’s lips in the shape of a kiss. Jean Valjean was full of secrecy and fear, preferring darkness, but Madeleine drew yet helplessly closer.  </p><p>It was easy to do so, for still, as the days passed, Javert, this new Javert, entered continuously into his orbit.</p><p>And so, Madeleine grasped for that ill-advised thing: a wish to be known, knowing he did this without grace, and thus without hope.</p>
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<a name="section0009"><h2>9. I will dissemble myself in’t</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>~1832~</p><p>Javert found himself walking again, the tap of his cane not quite in time with his feet. This he ignored, and proceeded on. An onlooker from the street would not have called his steps halting. It was evening, and the birds were loud about him. Ultime Fauchelevent had long left his door, and in this at least, Javert was confident that he would not return the night.</p><p>He looked about for windows which cast no light, for the sky was darkening, and there might yet be rooms suitable for rent. The windows were not in favour, for each contained a glow within them, candlelight flickering in greeting as he passed beside and underneath.</p><p>As he crossed under an awning which bathed the street in dusk, he realised that he had reached a place with trees. It was not overgrown; it was in fact very well kept. A small chapel, not far from Montparnasse Cemetery; not far from the Perrin boy’s grave.</p><p>He felt his fingers and neck chill quite suddenly, and found then that he had forgot his gloves, and scarf, and hat. They had fallen somewhere in his rooms, no doubt, as he had wrestled with the clothes to calm the wrestling in his heart (yes, it beat). He took a breath, warmed his fingers with the exhale as he considered the church door. Some ivy grew along the wall by its side, and there were some signs of decay at the wood’s bottom edge, but in all it seemed well preserved, and still amidst the bustle of the street Javert still stood in.  </p><p>The door opened. The man who came out started on seeing Javert, then smiled and bowed his head slightly.</p><p>“Monsieur,” the man said, almost apologetic, “I close the place, but if you have need—”</p><p>“I do not,” came Javert’s reply.</p><p>The man nodded. He was about Cuif’s age, Javert determined, or younger. It appeared he had been called to priesthood early. His hair still held its colour. “We are not acquainted monsieur. But I saw you the other day.”</p><p>Javert frowned slightly, then recalled the priest a distance from Perrin’s grave.</p><p>“Ah, at Montparnasse.”</p><p>“Quite, monsieur. I managed to speak with Mme. Perrin after.”</p><p>“Ah.” Javert said, suddenly on unsure footing. He had attended chapel and made prayers insofar as this was expected, good form, it had been, moving through the ranks. He had not participated in confessions, and instead sought a life where such acts were unnecessary, and so apart from receiving sacraments at Easter, lived without conversing with clergy. They were a class kept at a respectable distance, and Javert did not think to approach them.</p><p>“She has told me the handkerchief is washed, ready to be returned to its owner. She had thought it hers, initially. She later realised otherwise.”</p><p>Javert blinked twice before he recalled that he had indeed pressed something into Mme. Perrin’s hands, an act so unlike him he might have thought the memory a dream.</p><p>“I have no need of it,” Javert said after a moment’s pause.</p><p>“Those who comfort the grieving will be blessed,” said the priest. At Javert’s lack of reply, the priest smiled further. “Please do not say you have no need of blessings, too.”</p><p>“I dare not, Father,” said Javert.</p><p>“Call me brother, please. I have little need for ceremony. Not in a time like this.” He sighed now, looking beyond the church’s walls in the direction of the cemetery. “There are many to comfort. The grounds fill every day.”</p><p>“Your congregation?” asked Javert, not quite sure how he had been drawn into conversation.</p><p>The priest gave a shrug, quick and pained. “All and any are my flock, whether they run to or from the hills. They need only pass through the gate, and I will attend. At times I seek them.” Another shrug.</p><p>“That is charitable.”</p><p>“That is my duty,” nodded the priest, now turning to lock the door. As the key clicked within, he finished, “as was my vow.”</p><p>Javert knew something of vows, he wanted to say, but his tongue stopped within his mouth. He drummed his fingers against the head of his cane.  </p><p>“Good evening,” he settled for replying, and having no hat to tip, nodded briefly and touched the edge of his hand to his temple. He walked, footsteps tracing the path back to his rooms. He looked down this time, concentrating on the cobbles and puddles rather than the warmth of lit rooms about him.</p><p>The next day found Javert proceeding along the same path to the church at an earlier hour. He entered, and found a back pew. He saw some men and women ahead, in separate pews but closer to the front. Javert assumed a position of prayer while still seated. The windows were narrow here, just enough light casting down at the altar. The glass was not stained. He sat, prayerless, for a time which stretched till the cross’s shadow lengthened and faded.</p><p>“Brother,” he heard a voice say, and heard the sound of someone sitting beside him. He turned to face the noise.  </p><p>“Father,” he greeted.</p><p>“Have you petitions—”</p><p>“I have not.”</p><p>“Ah,” said the priest. “Well, I pray this roof has offered you some respite.”</p><p>“Perhaps,” answered Javert. “It is silent.”</p><p>“The Lord shows me my limitations,” said the priest, almost shyly, “but he grants you what you need. In that I praise Him.” Javert was reminded of Cuif.</p><p>“I meant no offence, Father.”</p><p>“Brother, and there is none taken. But come again, should these stones and these arches suit. The door is open as long as I can keep it. And yet—not tomorrow—” The priest paused, and raised a finger to curl a lock of hair past his forehead to fill that interlude.</p><p>Javert tilted his head. “Tomorrow?”</p><p>“Another burial. I shall be engaged most of the day outside.”</p><p>“Ah.”</p><p>The priest unfolded a piece of cloth from within his robe. “I return the kindness you gave.” His lips were tinged with amusement.</p><p>“Father—I had said—” started Javert.</p><p>“Please, brother,” said the priest, “Mme. Perrin will be sore vexed if this does not find its way back. She dares not grace your station.” The priest paused here, as if hesitant to reveal all that Mme. Perrin had communicated to him concerning Javert, some undoubtedly unfavourable. When Javert did not reply, the priest shrugged again, making him seem all the more boyish. He proffered the handkerchief once more.</p><p>“I am a man of the cloth. But not this cloth.”</p><p>Javert’s voice escaped him. “You joke!” So stunned was he that his hand upturned itself without his behest, and the handkerchief landed swiftly onto his palm.</p><p>“It is no sin, brother, I am told.”</p><p>Javert considered the handkerchief.</p><p>“And now this duty is done,” said the priest. Javert pursed his lips at the words.</p><p>“You have been kind to her,” Javert said, standing now.</p><p>“‘Tis but duty, brother,” said the priest. “Am I not mistaken: are you not a man of duty, too?”</p><p>Javert angled his head, not in thought, but by instinct. “It is not the same,” said Javert finally. He tucked the handkerchief into his coat pocket, and walked out of the chapel. The priest did not call out after him.</p><p>He did not return to his flat immediately. Not because, he told himself, that he feared Fauchelevent would return. That thought still scraped like a dull knife would through soil, but it was not sufficient to dig a hole so deep in which to sink a man. As he walked through the darkening streets, he rubbed at his eyes whenever he saw a flash of yellow—ugly, distinct, just ahead, round that corner, not knowing that his feet seemed to trip a little faster towards the sight. At other times, he thought he saw an ill-fitted soldier’s coat slip past, but a blink and it would vanish again.</p><p>Cuif’s flat was small. Kinder persons would have described it as homely, but Javert was not such a man. When he knocked, and the door opened, he had nodded and attempted something of a smile, though this only seemed to spark the nerves of Cuif even more. The younger man hastily stepped out.</p><p>“Sir!” greeted Cuif.</p><p>Javert stated his business swiftly, cleanly. “I investigate a matter, Cuif. Information must be sought from you.”</p><p>At Cuif’s askance, Javert explained through a single word: “Ultime”. Cuif flushed terribly in response, and Javert noted that he had begun picking the edge of his sleeve.</p><p>“He did not wish to be known, monsieur,” said Cuif. “I recognised him, you see. He walks with that coat—his form is quite known on the streets.” In a torrent of words, Cuif then described how he knew the rich beggar to be Javert’s neighbour at the hospital when he had crossed paths with him in his own precinct. Cuif had scarcely recognised his face in that moment. The old man was almost a changeling, were it not for that ridiculous shade of yellow. They had met a few more times after, and when Cuif had enquired of a place—well. And so, and thus, and therefore, Cuif had learned that Ultime had lodgings for rent. When no ire arose from Javert’s face, Cuif’s voice gained strength.</p><p>“He was hesitant, monsieur, on hearing your name. Perhaps it is because he knew your office. He seemed disposed to keeping himself innominate. But you seem to have surmised that. Have you history, sir?” Cuif’s question seemed thrown carelessly, but Javert recognised an undercurrent of an agent’s curiosity behind it.</p><p>A brawl in the street, was Javert’s answer. It flowed easily, for it was not exactly deception. Cuif nodded at this, as if Javert regularly graced his doorstep at evening time to query on personal matters, when neither man knew this to be true.</p><p>“How goes work, monsieur?” asked Cuif. Javert returned with some suitable response, and shortly thereafter bid Cuif farewell. There was much to think on, were Javert a man prone to rumination.</p><p>Javert told himself he was not such a man.</p><p>--</p><p>“Monsieur Javert.” The greeting came from above, slurred by the stairwell. The voice which spoke it was light, and gentle, and as Javert concentrated coming up from the final flight of stairs, he wondered what such owner of a voice would come looking for him. His steps cautioned as he reached the last few stairs. </p><p>As Javert placed his feet on the last step, he looked to the door. Ah. Yes, the porter would let this one in, thought Javert. His lips pursed, but he bowed. The lady before him—hardly more than a girl, really, stood in a dress of a simple floral design, and with quiet grace that looked out of place in the gloom.</p><p>“I think my father has offended you, monsieur,” said Cosette Pontmercy.</p><p>Javert angled his head, doffing his hat.</p><p>“I would not dare say that madame,” he said. He walked to the door, and she stepped aside as he grasped at his keys. It was not easy, with the cane and the gloves and the hat, and he found himself biting his lip as he reached into pockets that were too deep for the sort of convenience he needed. Cosette looked on.</p><p>“A man who says that implies that he has been offended, monsieur,” said Cosette.</p><p>Javert bristled, shaking his fringe out of his face, hands encumbered as they were. He had not cut his hair since leaving the hospital, and he felt no need to spare the expense of a barber. After all, this hair was practical enough for his day to day needs, and Javert was if anything, a practical man.</p><p>Finally, the door unlocked.</p><p>Javert’s lips twitched to the side as he stepped in, and he held out his hand to gesture towards the antechamber. He felt foolish. She could no doubt enter this property as she pleased, for it was her father’s, and likely hers by extension. As much, Javert supposed, as Ultime Fauchelevent was the girl’s father.</p><p>For a moment, Javert’s mind travelled back to the prostitute, her coughs, the chill of the mayor’s displeasure, and the sick ward. But only for a moment, for it would not do to let that sort of coldness seep into his lungs again, and he would not even let it threaten to do so. He flexed his jaw, hedging the coldness in, and stepped in after Cosette. He had never seen the child Cosette up close, so there was no danger in seeing yet another face overlapped with this adult one, and there was little enough he remembered of her mother.  </p><p>“A few days ago, I returned at evening to my home monsieur, and there I find my father in distress. He said he had misled a Monsieur Javert, who he had met in hospital, and who I then recalled.” Cosette had reached the dining table, and now turned around to face Javert.</p><p>“Madame?”</p><p>“I am here to apologise for him.”</p><p>If Javert could fold his hands behind him at that moment, he would have. His chin wrinkled. “There is no need.”</p><p>“There is every need, monsieur. To make amends, when one party upsets another. But he had thought, ah, you will forgive me.” Cosette hmm-ed. “He had thought your sense of propriety—” she paused, as if weighing her next words carefully. A moment later, she shook her head slightly, smiled, and continued, “He feared your sense of propriety would have prevented you from taking up his offer of residence. That it might have seemed—”</p><p>“Too generous,” said Javert, finishing the sentence for her. He set down his gloves and hat, cane leaning against his hip. He did not look at Cosette directly now, and yet he could not help but sense that Cosette Pontmercy was beaming at him.</p><p>“Yes,” she said. “That is what he said, and that you would be offended. But it seems this coquetry offends you more. And so, I have come to apologise on his behalf. I thought it might be better if you heard it from me.”</p><p>“Madame,” said Javert, and closed his eyes a second. “I have no quarrel with you.”</p><p>“So, you have a quarrel with my father?”</p><p>“I have no quarrel with M. Fauchelevent either.” It was too hastily spoken, almost snapped out. He was not in a position to argue. This much was true. Javert let his eyes shut again, this blink more measured as he readjusted the hat and gloves as they sat on the side table. Cosette’s smile bloom wider, her point well made. Javert drew himself further up and his cane gave a little stamp. It would not do to let himself sag against the table top in this moment as he so dearly wished.</p><p>The climb up the stairs had winded him, but that had merely been the tail of an even longer walk through the neighbourhood, though he no longer knew what he sought. There were houses he had noted in days past, with barred shutters: indications that there might be an apartment or room that matched his needs. He would call on these after completing far too quickly yet another round of tasks at the station house, he told himself, again and again, but he would instead find himself in the church, or wandering the cemetery (the days the priest held burial rites), and he called on no rooms. Today, had been one such walk among gravestones and freshly turned soil.</p><p>His knee trembled, then, and he reached for a chair before he was in danger of embarrassing himself. He sat down, and motioned for Cosette to do the same.</p><p>“Fauchelevent—your father,” he began, and stopped again. “He released me at the barricades.” The words felt sticky in his mouth. “I cannot abide further hospitality.”</p><p>“But you are paying for this, are you not, monsieur? If it will make you feel better, direct your business with me, instead of him.”</p><p>Javert frowned.</p><p>Cosette rested the tip of a finger on her chin. “Here, we will talk,” she said, and smiled again. “Business: with me. Not with my father or my husband.” From the look on her face, a clap of delight would not have been amiss, though her hands remained still.</p><p>Javert tipped his forehead lower, carding his hair out of cheek’s way before he knew his fingers had moved. This was an old habit making itself new, he realised, as he looked up, clasped his hands over one knee and tilted his head towards Cosette in attention.</p><p>“We shall have terms of contract, if you will,” Cosette said.</p><p>“I should pay more, or you should provide less,” replied Javert immediately. He looked about to say more, and pursed his lips, glancing apology at the lady. For all her mother’s history she was a baron’s wife, and, it would seem, his landlady. She did not seem to mind his interruption, and merely increased her smile, as if this were a new sort of adventure she was embarking on. Perhaps it was.</p><p>“Go on.”</p><p>Javert took a breath. “Or both.” He nodded at the unlocked bedroom, which still remained devoid of his belongings. “For instance, I have no need of another room. The kitchen and what’s in it suffices. It is only that there is no means of getting to the kitchen without passing through the antechamber.”</p><p>“All right,” said Cosette slowly, her eyes focusing on the bedroom door as she thought. “If it will put your mind at ease, I will lock that.”</p><p>Javert gave a tight nod.</p><p>“And on the matter of more payment, perhaps, monsieur, I would invite you to call on us?”</p><p>“Pardon?” Javert’s surprise showed on his face. His fingers froze against the sides of the chair.</p><p>Cosette laughed. “I would have, anyway, to make up for my father’s behaviour. And it seems we should make good relations with a tenant.”</p><p>“This is, this is not required, madame. Your hospitality—”</p><p>“Consider it your extra payment. Furthermore, my father’s aid does not discount the way in which—” her eyes turned momentarily sad. “The way in which my husband treated you. For I have been told of this story, too.”</p><p>“He has already paid in friends,” murmured Javert, now inching backwards in his seat. And her father’s aid had discounted—Javert shook his head, unwilling to meet Cosette’s eyes. “I would not wish to stir poor memories.” Something in his gut tightened and gave a small lurch.</p><p>“He sees now that sacrifice was needless on both sides. At least, he says this.” Cosette’s tone had turned serious, and she caught herself, for this turn in conversation was not what she had intended. “We spoke together, we all have a need to make amends. At least, that there must be some manner by which we may put our minds at some measure of ease. Please, come by this Friday, that you may shake hands with my father, and be friends.”</p><p>Friends. It was a strange word. Javert had not thought to apply it to the man who now went by Ultime Fauchlevent, association in the heat of a rebellion or no. This, of course, did not explain the ticking in his chest at the memory of their last meeting, when he had screwed his eyes shut till the sounds of footsteps, one heavier than the other, faded down the stairs—</p><p>“How does this relate to a business agreement between the two of us?”</p><p>“It would improve ours, monsieur,” said Cosette sweetly, and Javert saw then the spark of steel within that soft face. “If you would not wish to sour this one so soon.” And thus, there was no way for him to combat Mme. Pontmercy’s proposition. Her smile was teasing, but not mocking. The guile was one of warmth.</p><p>She lowered her voice and leaned forward, and at the light in her eyes Javert was reminded of some forest, singing bird. “In truth, I need to practise being a good host, you see. Papa never brought people around.”</p><p>Javert bowed from the neck. “I agree to these terms, madame, but not without reservation.”</p><p>“I would not have it any other way, monsieur,” said Cosette, and laughed a little tinkle of a laugh that brightened the shadows momentarily.</p><p>He managed a polite upturn of his mouth. Cosette seemed satisfied at this, and soon left. He had offered her nothing, not even water. His hand gripped his cane as this detail was noted, that in the scales of hospitality they now stood yet more uneven. This was surely not good policy.</p><p>And there was yet another detail which shone through, one he finally put his finger on as he hobbled towards the kitchen to find the pitcher of water reflecting sunset. The girl’s smile: so bright, reminded him of—of her father’s, though she was not related to that much older man by blood. He gripped the pitcher with one hand, steadying a cup as he poured himself a drink. Then he sat, looking as the light moved across the table by degrees, one finger tapping the rim of his cup, turning the conversation over and over.  </p>
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<a name="section0010"><h2>10. The rudeness that hath appeared in me</h2></a>
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    <p>His hand clenched further around the handle, flesh steeling itself in a battle against wrought iron. Javert stared at his knuckles as the bones leading from them flexed and dipped, pulling the skin about them taut. The ground seemed to shift beneath him, and he released his grip before the hand betrayed even the smallest tremor. That too, would not do.</p><p>This was how Javert had stopped himself from pacing on reaching the gate at Rue Plumet five minutes before his appointment. Pacing would not do, for it would tire him, and he had decided that he should not be attending on the Pontmercys in any condition more inferior than his present usual. He noted the seclusion of the location. He must have passed this way a thousand times, and yet this particular spot did not call for more than a cursory glance. The garden seemed well kept, almost freshly so, if hidden. He let his lips twist upwards at that observation. The man who had chosen to live here had chosen well to escape detection. It had worked.</p><p>Now, Javert loosened his hand and pressed his fingers lightly against the gate. It was unlocked for the day, so it seemed, and after lifting the latch, Javert found that it opened easily. He stepped in.</p><p>The first step was easy. The second, not so.</p><p>Every step seemed harder than the next. His feet were dragged down with some sort of black tar he could not see. Twice, he stopped. Three times his right toes pointed themselves towards the gate before he forced them back, grinding the ball of his foot into the ground. It would be a lie to ascribe this new halt in his gait to the use of a cane, accustomed as he was now to using it. Nonetheless, with his next steps, he leaned heavily on it as he pushed onwards.</p><p>It was just a meeting. A biscuit, some drink. And it would be with the young madame. Nothing more. He repeated this to himself twice as he made his way along the path.</p><p>At the door, he paused again, but briefly, then brought his hand to the wooden panelling. He knocked. It opened. A housekeeper: a small lady with a bobbing bow showed him in, and directed him to the sitting room before she ambled off to what he assumed was the kitchen. He stepped closer to the doorway as her footsteps faded down a corridor.</p><p>The curtains were but half drawn, and sunlight lit the room. Javert paused, shoulder leaning slightly into the doorframe. A man sat in an armchair by the fireplace at a slight angle away from Javert. His head was turned towards the empty grate, and so he did not notice when Javert appeared at the entrance. Javert’s eyes followed the slope of his shoulders (more slumped than he remembered) up around the curls of his hair (greyer than he remembered, with portions glowing a bright auburn between rays of sunlight), and imagined the merest wrinkling of a forehead he could not yet see. It was M. Fauchelevent, Cosette’s father. Javert became very still as he considered the scene, eyes moving from man to grate, to man. Only the crackling of an invisible log could be heard, and only an imaginary firelight moved.</p><p>Despite the stillness, Javert’s stomach clenched. He kept his hands at his sides; did not dare shift his feet against the flooring, nor could he move his eyes. The crease between the thumb and palm of his free hand tensed, drawing a line through flesh, suspending as it were both Javert’s breath and his carriage. Then a sigh broke through the air, and Fauchelevent’s head dipped further down, and another voice punctured the seeming film that had encased the room.</p><p>At this release, Javert’s cane changed hands.</p><p>Fauchelevent startled at the voice, and turned towards the doorway. Cosette now stood beside Javert, repeating her greeting, but Fauchelevent looked not at her. Instead, his eyes were on their guest, from cane to hands to face, Fauchelevent’s face bunching and uncreasing in a series of minute twitches melding into one. He looked caught. He looked the way Javert felt, just for an instant, with the air squeezed out of him a fraction faster than was needed. Their gazes locked, and once more Javert seemed unable to tear his eyes away. He reminded himself that this was Fauchelevent, a man he had not known before the summer of 1832. There was no reason for this quandary.</p><p>Cosette’s voice filtered through once more, and when Javert caught the words, he shifted his head, but did not remove his eyes from Fauchelevent. For his part, Fauchelevent had begun studying the pattern along his armrest in earnest.</p><p>“I am well, madame,” said Javert, and here the rules of courtesy, well enough ingrained in him, allowed him to shift his gaze to the floor at Cosette’s feet. He bowed his greeting, then raised his head to see Cosette’s smile.</p><p>“Then please, sit.”</p><p>Fauchelevent arose. The two men bowed to each other, Javert gripping his cane as tightly as he saw Fauchelevent grip his armrest. Javert pursed his lips; flattened them. Again, a question floated from Cosette, but Javert barely grasped it. Fauchelevent had lowered himself back into his chair, and now sat with his hands folded in his lap. Javert ran the question in his mind again, face pinching as he recalled it. Ah.</p><p>“No, madame, not coffee, please. Water will do.”</p><p>Cosette made a small noise of surprise. “Will you take tea then?”</p><p>“Tea is expensiv—” he bit his tongue, and bowed hastily. He said his next words with polite caution. “I would not want to waste your stores.”</p><p>At the same time, Fauchelevent said, “Get him the tea.” Fauchelevent was now studying his hands, fingers outstretched towards the fireplace, but they might as well have been pointed at Javert. If eyes could bore holes through men’s heads, the look Javert shot to Fauchelevent might have been considerably more damaging. The laws of nature having not changed, it had no effect.</p><p>“There is no need,” said Javert.</p><p>“The tea, if you please, Cosette.”</p><p>“Papa?”</p><p>Fauchelevent lifted his eyes now, avoiding Javert’s bulk, though Javert stood in front of him, and called round to Cosette. “We shall all drink it.” His voice remained polite, and small smile graced his lips. “It will be no waste at all. And Toussaint shall have some too.” Javert could not at this moment tell if those lips trembled, for his focus had narrowed on the forelock of Fauchelevent’s hair. He experienced the sudden urge to press a finger to his temple. The blood there had decided to make its knocking presence known.</p><p>Just then, Marius appeared. Fauchelevent caught sight of him, and his smile fluttered wider. “There are enough of us. Yes, come Marius, we have us a guest.”</p><p>The boy’s greeting smile was almost sheepish. Javert bowed to Marius, and if such a bow were a bit stiffer than usual, they would surely think nothing of it. At Cosette’s urging Javert sat down in a chair to Fauchelevent’s left. The chair immediately seemed too close, but it would be unseemly to try to shift it. In any case he had already sat. All he could do now was grip his cane, his hands battling with the effort not to hold it like a cudgel.</p><p>Marius and Cosette retreated: to collect the tea, they said, and Javert was left alone with Fauchelevent.</p><p>“Thank you for coming,” said Fauchelevent lowly. Javert did not look at him. The fireplace was indeed a point of interest from this vantage point, and Javert considered that instead.</p><p>“I did it not for you, monsieur,” replied Javert. “But for the madame. I honour my commitments.”</p><p>Another sigh escaped Fauchelevent, with the echo of something familiar caught in the back of his throat, which in turn caused Javert’s gaze to dart towards him. It was too dangerous not to watch this man. By voice alone he turned too easily into someone else.</p><p>“Yes, I am glad for that,” said Fauchelevent.  </p><p>Silence, for a moment, as Fauchelevent hesitated, hands knitting. Then, “If you could permit us—this, at least, a degree of friendship—”</p><p>Javert bit the inside of his cheek to keep his voice from rising, the words bristling through his teeth. “There is hardly a degree of <em>anything</em>, monsieur.”</p><p>He looked at Fauchelevent’s hands, and looked quickly away again when they seemed to unfurl towards him. Javert resolved to avoid such steps to friendship, avoid such path to a fire at night and the dangerous softness of its light. There would be no illusions. “I will be civil, I will accept your cordiality, and your daughter’s hospitality. For I am <em>her</em> tenant.”</p><p>Not yours, the creases of Javert’s mouth said, and his brows ironed themselves to prevent the betraying of any thought otherwise.</p><p>Fauchelevent looked to the low table in front of them. His mouth worked silently for a few moments with words too loud for speech, then he closed his mouth. He had raised a hand to his jaw, and was rubbing the edge of his thumb between jaw and chin, though it seemed Javert felt the chafe, not him.</p><p>“Acquaintances, yes,” said Fauchelevent, then murmured softer still, “I can be content with this.” Then he raised his eyes to Javert with a look that said the opposite and Javert felt an answering burn in his gut. “Monsieur.”</p><p>Javert folded his hands over his cane, forcing them to remain loose. It was just tea.</p><p>--</p><p>On the second meeting Javert managed a quicker walk up to the door. He did not congratulate himself, and he set aside any questions concerning the strange whims of Mme. Pontmercy in requesting a second visit. This time, the tea tray was already placed out when he entered the living room, and this time, Fauchelevent was not looking absently into the fireplace. Indeed, it seemed the opposite: his eyes were quite keenly directed to Javert’s approaching frame.</p><p>After the pleasantries are exchanged, Javert sat in the same chair he had from before. Cosette poured out a cup of tea, and as she did, she spoke.</p><p>“Do you not like coffee, monsieur? I thought most—” the warning look from both her husband and her father did not silence her. On the contrary, it only caused her to quirk her brow in greater amusement. “I suppose that is old rumour about policemen. They say if you spot a man doing nothing but drinking coffee at a café all day, he must be a spy, you know.” The three men shifted in turn. Marius picked at a button, his lips turning downwards, Fauchelevent looked to cover a cough, and Javert covered what was not discomfort— for Javert would not be discomfited— into receiving the cup from Cosette.</p><p>Cosette leant in conspiratorially to Javert as she looked at Marius and Fauchelevent again. “I think I may have upset the two men of my heart.”</p><p>“Not at all dearest.”</p><p>“Please, my child.”</p><p>Cosette smiled wide.</p><p>Javert bowed his head a fraction, first towards Marius, then towards Fauchelevent. “It is just,” he said, “that coffee turns my hands cold.” He linked his fingers together. Today they were warm, almost uncomfortably so, but better that the heat was concentrated in his hands than in his eyes.</p><p>“That is peculiar, monsieur!” </p><p>Javert shrugged. He settled straighter in his chair.</p><p>His hand stopped, half caught in the middle of a self-depreciating wave. “There was a winter,” he said, and as he did, his eyes landed on Fauchelevent. It was a strange sort of luxury, he supposed, back then that Madeleine had afforded the M-Sur-M precinct a budget for such matters, though the coffee beans were used sparingly and diluted to watery sourness. He had not noticed it then.  Later, in Paris, Chabouillet had taken to meeting Javert regularly at coffee houses, to check in on his progress, he would say. Javert had not acquired a taste for the drink in the way Chabouillet did.</p><p>“I drank a lot of coffee, and I shivered all the more. I later supposed the cause.”</p><p> “I do not do well with the cold.” His lips did not quite close as he returned Fauchelevent’s look. Now he noted how the other man stiffened, knew that somewhere in that man, another recognised the winter he spoke of.</p><p>“Paris must be difficult then, monsieur,” laughed Cosette. He turned back to her.</p><p>“It is not so bad as some others,” Javert acquiesced. “But I am from the south.”</p><p>“Really?” said Marius. The boy had greeted him warily at the entrance, and now that he had returned to the drawing room, sat as if he wished he could quit the place. Javert would have been inclined to be sympathetic, if he were the sort of man to be. He felt very much the same. The first meeting had been awkward. Javert’s replies were short, though he maintained politeness. Fauchelevent’s presence was a strain, and his own presence likely a different sort of burden for others present. “You do not sound like you are from Paris, sure,” said Marius. “But you do not sound like you belong to the Midi either.”</p><p>Javert gave a slow nod. He would not have said more, except the expectant look from Cosette stirred some strange impetus within him to elaborate. He had, after all, little to hide on this matter.</p><p>“One can, when learning from books, alter one’s accent. Phrases, sounding of words.” He shrugged. “It served my job better. In time, the alteration stuck.” He shrugged again, and folded one arm under the other.</p><p>There was silence for a moment, as the persons sitting sipped at their drink. As Javert lowered his cup, the hairs at the back of his neck began to rise, the cause of which was revealed to him the next instant; was Fauchelevent. He too, had placed his cup back in his saucer in time with Javert, and was now considering him, leaning forward ever so slightly.</p><p>“So, monsieur,” said Fauchelevent. “You believe men can change?” Javert’s brow inched lower. To any man, this would be the start of a casual debate. But the earnestness laced with Fauchelevent’s light voice told of a man who was not about to dabble in philosophy. Worse still, underneath that earnestness was something else, a quality which told of a man who knew that Javert was not a man given to debate in the first place. So Javert, who was not any man, felt his lips turning downwards at the words.</p><p>“Parts of themselves, at least?” continued Fauchelevent, and placed his cup and saucer down gingerly at the side table near him. He might as well have gripped his armrest. It would have suited him better, thought Javert, before squashing that thought viciously down. He straightened his mouth.</p><p>“A voice is just a voice, monsieur,” Javert said eventually. “It is a covering that does not change the man within.”</p><p>“I think a voice reveals a person, rather, monsieur,” chimed Cosette.</p><p>Javert’s eyes met Fauchelevent’s just then. “If you say so, madame,” returned Javert, if only for his thoughts to be heard over the blood racing across his chest. Voices revealed too, yes. It was why he forced himself to look upon Fauchelevent, should he forget and turn him into someone else. And yet, no, it was because things did not change. Under the details of smoothened, polite speech there always lingered something of the old man—in this man before him—that recognised its fellow in Javert’s own clipped, regionless pitch.</p><p>--</p><p>Reverend Zacharie noticed the grey haired man-of-the-police being, as he tended to be within the church, a veritable statue, seated once more in the back pews, staring ahead with clasped hands. His cane lay long ways along the bench, a departure from their usual place, either leant on the backrest of the pew in front, or within the man’s hands.</p><p>“We have not exchanged names, brother,” said Zacharie on approaching.</p><p>“Father,” the man replied. His posture was stonier than usual.</p><p>“Yes,” hummed Zacharie, “they do call me that here. But my name is Zacharie.” At this, the man’s eyes slid away from the altar to look at the priest. Zacharie bobbed a mild smile in answer.</p><p>“Javert,” answered the man. His eyes did not leave Zacharie’s as quickly as they usually did in their meetings; did not return to their fixed point at the end of the church.</p><p>“I met a man today,” Javert said.</p><p>“As one does, in this world,” replied Zacharie. The priest saw Javert’s eyebrow quirk, though Javert muttered tonelessly an as-you-say-father. The man did not seem to require silence of solitude in that moment; did not seem hostile to Zacharie, and so the young priest waited.</p><p>“It strikes me, that I know him,” said Javert.</p><p>“Oh?”</p><p>“Yes.” Javert looked away now, this time at his hands. </p><p>It was then that Zacharie noticed the prayer beads wrapped around Javert’s fist.</p><p>“Came you to pray?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>After a minute, when no further reply came, Zacharie let Javert alone. Javert stayed an hour.  </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Love sought is good, but given unsought is better</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The leaves underfoot did not crunch, slightly sodden as they were. In consequence of this, Javert’s boots were silent as they traversed the streets, while Javert’s countenance bore something of the day’s dampened sky. He carried his cane in hand a third of the way down, and his strides resembled more and more those from days before the June rebellion, yet there remained no fixed purpose to them.</p><p>Javert was wandering.</p><p>He had quit the station early again, the work being done. It was better this way, he had perceived, for the commissaire had begun to get antsy about the not-yet-reinstated-policeman. Javert, who had previously been efficient in ignoring such vague buzzing, now found himself more attuned—indeed, more irritated, by the sense of such sentiments emanating from some in the station house who passed his desk. This wall of unease had thickened after Mme. Perrin stopped her daily supplications at the station house door. Javert did not doubt that much relief would be felt when his post there expired.</p><p>He found himself stopping mid-stride as he rounded a corner in near collision with a young lady he quickly perceived to be the young Mme. Pontmercy. She was dressed in muted colours, and seemed appropriately warm, there being some thicker lining under her cloak.</p><p>“You are unaccompanied,” Javert said by way of greeting, surprise having thrown niceties to the wayside. Cosette smiled and answered before he could correct himself.</p><p>“Good day, monsieur. Would you walk with me, then?”</p><p>Javert did. He noted as he took step in time with Cosette that they were not far from where the café-turned-stronghold once was. Normalcy appeared to have returned, insofar as normalcy was poverty.</p><p>“My father walks with my husband. They must have time to be further acquainted without my hindrance, and Marius says repeatedly that he has amends to make between them. They are not far off, but I had been distracted by a child just a short way back,” said Cosette as an explanation. “I am sure our paths will find each other soon enough.”</p><p>“Why not a garden, madame?” asked Javert. “Surely it would better suit.”</p><p>“Ah, we have been to the Luxembourg often,” said Cosette. “But there, it is plants which are tended to, and not people.” Javert had no response to this, and so they continued walking.</p><p>About five minutes later, Cosette drew her purse, and placed two sous in the open hand of a crouched woman wrapped in a rag of a shawl. A kindly word was exchanged, thanks and gratitude extended, and Cosette moved on. Javert kept pace with her, looking behind him once at the beggar-woman.</p><p>Eventually, Javert murmured. “Surely it is not safe to display money in such quarters unaccompanied, madame.”</p><p>“But you are here with me!” replied Cosette with a small laugh. She gave a slight shrug after, almost apologetic. “I have always been safe in these streets. They know my father, you see.”</p><p>Javert’s ears were piqued.</p><p>“They know your father,” he repeated.</p><p>“Yes, monsieur. There was an incident, it seems. A botched robbery, him the intended victim. Word had got round that the beggar who gave alms was not to be trifled with. That protection has seemed to extend to me, for I have faced no trouble.”</p><p>Javert’s brow wrinkled. “I would still be cautious,” he said.</p><p>“Perhaps those who would resort to such means would be the very ones who require charity,” hummed Cosette amiably. Neither unease nor offence showed on her face, and she walked beside Javert as if they were long acquainted. Javert, who was unaccustomed to both charity and the charitable, had no reply yet again.</p><p>Soon enough, Javert could see an elderly gentleman dressed in a yellowed coat and supported at the elbow by a much younger man about forty paces away. That the two were familiar to him, though their backs were turned, was not lost on Javert. The recognition nestled uneasily in his mind.</p><p>“Your father—” began Javert, but aborted further words. Cosette took lead with the sentence, as they proceeded closer to the duo.</p><p>“My father would tend to me as a flower in a hothouse, monsieur. But he too, requires nurturing. I have learned this in the past few months.”</p><p>Javert stopped walking, and looked at Cosette. She too, stopped, but looked with a wistful smile at the two men ahead. “And yet,” said Cosette softly, “he is a wilder sort of plant. I fear he has over-pruned himself.” She glanced at Javert now, as both began walking again. “Monsieur, you will forgive my thoughts uttered aloud.”</p><p>“There is nothing to forgive, madame,” said Javert.</p><p>When they were but ten paces away, Javert observed that Fauchelevent had stopped, and was speaking to a child. A wind blew the child’s voice over. “Have you messages, monsieur? Or washing, monsieur, that my mama could help with?”</p><p>“A message?” Javert heard Fauchelevent say, as he reached in his pocket and produced a franc. “Yes, a message for your mother.” He bent down and clasped the coin together with the child’s palm. “Here is the message, for growing children need bread and milk.”</p><p>The child’s glee was palpable, even seven paces away.</p><p>Javert bowed to Cosette before they neared any closer to Fauchelevent and Marius. “Madame, I leave you in better company,” he said, formality this time appropriately prepared. Javert turned down another street, but slowed enough to see Cosette clasp Fauchelevent’s free arm, and the trio proceed onward together. However, He did not stay in the vicinity long enough to see Cosette gesture behind her, and Fauchelevent’s head then turn to seek out Javert.</p><p>In the days that followed, Javert would chance upon the family again as they visited the poor, until perhaps it was not by chance at all. A nodded greeting and he would carry on by. No further conversations arose between himself and Mme. Pontmercy in the streets, but Javert would observe the trio. Were others to observe Javert, they would have seen that he became especially watchful in the moments that either Mme. Pontmercy or M. Fauchelevent broke away from the group.</p><p>--</p><p>~1785~</p><p>Javert showed up every day. Patiently he stood, not sat, at a stoop near one of the squares. Soon, people knew that he was taking messages. A few centimes here from the sender, a few more from the recipient on delivery. If he made two sous it meant at least a loaf of bread and something more. His mother had sent him out of the house. She didn’t need him hanging about as she did business, she had said.</p><p>Being in the square, Javert saw the school children of the merchant families on their way to school, both girls and boys. The boys dressed differently than he did. On seeing this, Javert would tug at his button-less, lapel-less jacket and push at his sleeves. Sometimes he thought of himself in those clothes, but if he thought about it too long his face would begin to scrunch, and he would chew on his lip to keep from sneezing, or something like that. It was a world he watched as through the gaps of shutters. It was not a world he could touch.</p><p>However, there was to be one occasion when that world touched his.</p><p>“Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle! You dropped this.”</p><p>The girl turned back to look at him, the hem of her pinafore swishing sideways. He held out the book again. She was taller than him, and a few years older. She looked very grown up, in the way she held herself, and Javert rocked on his heels in a bid to stop himself from tip-toeing for them to be eye to eye. He was not conscious enough of the dirt on his clothes to attempt to brush it off. It would have been more awkward had he known, and tried, for in his other hand he clutched a milk container’s handle. </p><p>“What is it?” her mother called out from a few paces away. The woman was well-dressed, and looked nothing like his mother, yet there was a severity to her face that reminded him of her. He was glad that she did not approach.</p><p>“Nothing, mother,” the girl called over her shoulder. As she took the book from him she tilted her head sideways. “Do you know what that says?” she asked, pointing at the letters on the cover.</p><p>“No,” said Javert. “But I know that it takes two strokes of the finger to make that letter, and only one for that.” He pointed at the two characters.</p><p>She made a small noise. It sounded like disapproval.</p><p>“You must be stupid, then.”</p><p>“I’m not stupid.” He frowned at the book cover.</p><p>“But you cannot read. I can read, and they call me stupid in class.” She turned up her nose fully. “So you <em>must</em> be worse.” Carelessly she swiped at the stray fleck of mud that Javert had been unable to clean off the cover.</p><p>“And you got it all dirty.” The tone was sharper now, and Javert found himself kicking at the ground. The dust settled over his shoes.</p><p>“Didn’t mean to,” he mumbled.</p><p>“And good children apologise,” she said finally, her voice rising and falling in memorised staccato. A turn of her head and she was gone, leaving Javert behind. He watched as her bonnet bobbed out of view.</p><p>“M’sorry,” he said softly, then jammed his free hand in what little pocket he had, his bottom lip rising to cover its brother. He kept his head down as he wandered through the streets, though practice meant he ducked under the ladder carried between two men, sidestepped the cart that appeared round the corner, and skipped lightly out of the way of descending swill from a second storey window, all while keeping his eyes on the ground.</p><p>Soon enough his own stoop came into view. He scratched at his ear as he ascended the staircase.</p><p>“Mother,” he said, carefully edging through the doorway into darkness, “when I am old enough shall I be able to go to school?”</p><p>She sat on a chair in front of a small dresser, and did not look at him as she spoke.</p><p>“Why?” Her voice was scornful. “What will school do for you?”</p><p>“The gentlemen say if I am to improve, I should. I cannot read the addresses they write on the messages.”</p><p>“Good, that you can’t,” was her short answer. “It will stop you from being meddlesome. You pry enough.” In truth he was only careful, and she knew this. But the sight of his tousled mop of hair did her heart no good. With hair that was softer and lighter than hers, it was too much like Him, and increasingly she did not wish to think of Him. “Did you get milk,” she said more than asked, and angled herself further away from the boy. Javert had, and set it on the table.</p><p>“Tonight, I will be busy,” she said. Already she was decked in cheap perfume, and wearing the better of her two shawls.</p><p>“Is it M. Jacques again?”</p><p>She gave him an absent cuff to his ear, which he dodged. “What did I say about meddling?” his mother asked, her voice sharp. “Yes, it is M. Jacques. Does that satisfy?” Javert’s brow pinched together lightly. M. Jacques had been calling for the past month, sometimes with roses, sometimes with harsh words.</p><p>“Yes, it is M. Jacques,” she said again. “He brings tea, to try.” Except it was nearing night. And it was not tea they drunk, in any case, for M. Jacques could afford no such thing. Rather, M. Jacques had acquired the taste for certain excesses, such as ale. Javert knew this because there were nights he would stumble into the flat with Javert’s mother, stinking of the stuff, both of them giggling as they passed into her room.</p><p>Sometimes there was shouting.</p><p>But his mother would say that at least M. Jacques was better than the man before, who had not stayed long enough for Javert to remember his name.</p><p>That night, once his mother had left, he crept to the roof. He climbed, clinging to each ledge and foothold. Once he had reached the top, he drew out a piece of paper he had found on the street, carefully folded and tucked into his shirt. He flattened it with his palm, running his fingers against the creases. It was a stray flyer, and it had letters on it. That was the important bit.</p><p>It was a few days after the full moon, but tonight’s still shone brightly in the sky. This was good. He only had so many days in which he could read by it. To light a candle would be unthinkable. They could not bear the expense, his mother had said constantly, sometimes weeping, sometimes with hard little eyes like black and blue beads spinning on a taut string.</p><p>Javert did not know that his own eyes, in their frankness, pricked her the more.</p><p>He sat, tracing his finger over each letter. He did not know what they meant. He knew they were words, that somehow these shapes and spidery lines would form something one could <em>read</em>, and therefore improve, so that one did not have to remember everything because the paper would do it for you… and because of that, one had more room in one’s head for more. The gentlemen who gave him messages had said as much. That girl too, with her bonnet flopping over her forehead as she tilted her head down and her nose up at once as Javert held out the book she had dropped in the street. She had said he was stupid. Javert did not wish to be stupid.</p><p>So he traced the letters, committing the shapes to memory under white moonlight. Someday, someone would tell them what they were, but in the meantime he would know the shapes well. They stood like sentinels on the page, like inky soldiers marching across paper. In a week, the moon would be too weak to read by, and the only thing Javert would then trace were the patterns of stars in the night’s sky.</p><p>Someday, someone would tell him what those meant and were for, too.</p><p>--</p><p>~1832~</p><p>By the sixth visit Cosette had managed to persuade Javert to call weekly henceforth, and it was now November.</p><p>The greetings were easy now, the conversations bearable. Javert had even grown accustomed to Toussaint’s stammered greetings. Further to this, though it still grated, Javert had become used to the manner in which his eyes would lock with Fauchelevent’s, as if circling in an arena, though they never sat more than five feet away.</p><p>Yes, the greetings were easy.</p><p>It was the leave-taking which grew worse with each successive turn. Each time, as he stepped out of the sitting room, Javert’s shoulders would flatten against his spine as he felt Fauchelevent’s gaze rake along his back. His collar would turn hot where it pushed against his hair, which now grew till it curled in waves about the base of his neck. A toss of his head, though it moved his fringe, would not relieve the pressure of those eyes on him. Instead, it only multiplied and transferred the pressure to his chest and his belly, till it was all he could do not to slam his fist against the wall panelling on his way to the front door, for lack of anything to seize.</p><p>Yet something dragged him back to each meeting, and were he to turn over the soil of his thoughts, he would know that it was not simply Mme. Pontmercy’s hospitality which did so.</p><p>After this sixth meeting, just as he reached the door, a voice cracked towards him.</p><p>“How long will you forget me?”</p><p>Javert jerked his jaw at the voice, unmistakably Fauchelevent’s. He angled his head as his shoulders turned slowly to face the other man. His lips warred into a crooked frown, not quite a sneer.</p><p>“What.”</p><p>The question was repeated.</p><p>“I do not understand,” was Javert’s reply.</p><p>“Forever, Javert?”</p><p>“Speak not—” Javert turned his face away from the voice, but it clung to his ear, and large fingers clasped about his wrist, the one which belonged to the hand which gripped his cane. The fingers were warm, as was the breath against his ear. It enticed. It was terrible.</p><p>“How long will you hide your face from me?” Fauchelevent stood behind him, and the sound of his voice drew a thread from the base of Javert’s tongue through his spine. Javert stiffened. He swallowed and clenched his jaw, trying to break that thread which now began to wind between his ribs, pulling tighter with each pass.</p><p>“What shall I say, that you will see me?” asked Fauchelevent. The corridor was dark, for it approached evening. To Javert’s knowledge, Cosette and Marius had remained in the sitting room, and he could hear their light chatter as if through water. Fauchelevent, on the other hand, spoke in a whisper that resounded between Javert’s eardrums.</p><p>“I look at you, monsieur,” said Javert through gritted teeth. “I do not hide my eyes.” This much was true. In his visits, as he conversed with the family, Fauchelevent had looked away more times than Javert. Was it strange that Javert had kept count? “We are acquaintances, monsieur—” He meant the salutation to be perfunctory, as he had managed many times before. A slight coldness would not have been faulted, either, but there was a lilt towards the end that came unbidden, that seemed as if it were a longer phrase which wished to complete itself, indeed could have, with two more words: Le, Maire. Javert’s mouth worked a swallow against this.</p><p>Fauchelevent’s voice cracked again, “We are not.”</p><p>“Monsieur—” Javert tried, and at a hitch in his speech rising again towards that old, long foreign salutation, stopped. His mouth was thick with saliva. Eventually: “You leap the bounds of civility,” he managed.</p><p>“What more can I say? What more can I do? I swear to you—”</p><p>“Do not swear.” Javert’s answer was a whisper, jagged at the edges. The string between his ribs wove tauter, looping now about his lungs. Something hammered in his chest. Javert refused to believe that it was his heart. It would not be so loud. He shut his eyes and gripped his cane with both hands. His fingers felt like ribbons, tangled as they were about the cane.</p><p>The hand at his wrist moved to touch his elbow, and Javert’s face shifted to look as if he had bit into something both bitter and sour. He hissed, but did not (could not?) move away. The hand remained, but when gentling fingers moved as if to soothe, his eyelids flung themselves open and he tugged his arm back to his side. Fauchelevent’s hand retreated.</p><p>“Go back to your family,” said Javert to Fauchelevent’s shadow, cast as it was ahead of them both, appearing to loom larger. The shadow shook with a breath, and Javert heard a clicking in Fauchelevent’s throat; sensed the flickering of the man’s lashes. In another time, it would have been so easy to lean back into that shadow. This was not that other time.</p><p>Another sigh came, and Javert perhaps answered it by plucking his lips with his teeth. He was not sure; clamped his mouth shut for good measure. His breath came out on short streams, ragged and hasty despite his best efforts. His knuckles were white. Fauchelevent’s hand reached for Javert again; now met with Javert’s shoulder. When Javert did not shift, Fauchelevent spoke.</p><p>“How long, Javert, shall I cry, and you not hear?”</p><p>Javert grit his teeth, his chin bowing into his right shoulder. His cheek was a hair’s breadth away from the edge of Fauchelevent’s hand, a distance his breath could easily breach. But his skin crossed that distance first, and as cheek met hand both men gasped. Then Fauchelevent gasped again. Javert’s face felt cold; as if not a part of him, but his breath flowing back at him from the hand was fevered. Lips almost against Fauchelevent’s knuckles, he muttered something. It might have been ‘I will not hear’. It might have been ‘I cannot hear, will not, shall not, not even in the night’s still’, but those words transformed themselves, and Javert no longer knew what he was saying.</p><p>Javert heard a strangled noise escape from the back of Fauchelevent’s throat. At the same time, Javert said, “I stood upon my watch. I set myself—” he swallowed— “upon the tower.” Fauchelevent’s fingers tightened, faltered, tightened again. For his part, Javert splayed his fingers, pressing with his palms into the cane. Ten points of flesh dug into air. The words pulled themselves slowly from his tongue. “I watched to see what my lord—” here he had to steady his breath as his words threatened to hurl themselves from hush to bellow, “would say to me.”</p><p>“Please,” said Fauchelevent.</p><p>“Monsieur,” said Javert, for it was all he was left to answer with. It came with a betraying hitch Fauchelevent— the man inside Fauchelevent— would have recognised. Javert turned away fully now, as those tentative fingers loosened entirely and left Javert. Javert tasted myrrh, quelled a shudder and stepped away: through the door, through the gate. As he walked to his flat, the ring of Fauchelevent’s grip (hardly a grip), remained a thorny echo through layers of cloth, looping from wrist to shoulder.</p><p>He rubbed at his arm, but the sensation would not leave him, and the string about his ribs grew tighter still.</p><p>--</p><p>With one eye open and one eye shut he understood that this world was one split: one past and one present, one near and one far, and if he tried to open both eyes all worlds would be lost to him. Instead, he closed both, or at least, something pulled the other lid shut, and he sank through mire till it squeezed him out on to dry land again. He heard the baying of hounds. He was in a forest, the ground springy and soft, covered in moss, and he was alternatingly a hare being chased; a beast after the wolf; a fox up a tree and a cat skittering across ice. He was all of these at intervals and at once, and he didn’t quite understand how but knew only that he was running, panting, and that he was so very thirsty.</p><p>He felt thrice drowned in a bath of sea. There were bands of iron about his heart and now they were breaking, but he did not know what the metal would be smelted into: whether chain-links, or a sword, or a crown. A smile from the sky shattered into resin shards and fell into his eye and he felt no pain, but saw the land now in blurred orange. It was cold where the pieces fell on his skin like red snow. It did not hurt.</p><p>A flutter of gilded wings at the corner of his eyes caused him to turn. He saw a feathered hart and followed it through old trees and over spongy ground till he reached a cabin. Its roof was thatched with willow, its door made from the wood of an ash. The path was easy but his feet shook and their soles felt sticky with each movement. He heard another flutter, louder, frantic, and shielded his eyes. For a moment, he feared something would come to peck them out, but when he felt nothing, peered over his arm.</p><p>In that moment, he felt the echo of a hot coal pressed against—within his lips, again without pain. He moved on, burst into the cabin, where he saw a man decked in white, smiling, with his hair still, though a whirlwind tore about the room. Valjean once more covered his face with his arms. The feathered hart had cantered onto a table, was equally still and silent. It turned both eyes: spherical lakes, to Valjean, dipping its head. On its horns were many candles.</p><p>“Bishop,” said Valjean, and leaned heavily against the door post. The Bishop smiled at him and lit a candle. The whirlwind took the light of it and its many siblings, throwing them against windows and walls.</p><p>“Bishop.”</p><p>“Jean Valjean.” The name wafted over him through the howling. Marius had begun calling him Father Jean at some point, but this was different. This struck him again at his core and made his knees twist and his torso bend. “Brother.”</p><p>“Bishop.”</p><p>“I see you followed Hope,” said Myriel.</p><p>“Hope? You said to follow it, but I cannot,” answered Valjean, exasperated. “I sit in my chair every day and I cannot pursue it.”</p><p>“Yet you followed it here.”</p><p>“This is a dream,” said Valjean, because that was the only way this was possible. “This is nothing. I wake and I forget the events of my sleep, but the grief does not leave me.” He shook his head, almost in rage.</p><p>“I see him and for a moment I think perhaps he is here, and he has brought with him the chains, and that is permissible—” he almost choked. Myriel nodded, encouraging him to continue.</p><p>“God gave me Cosette, and with that—with that, hope,” Valjean finished, hand dropping to his side. “But now it pains me. I thought to pursue without it was awful once, but something perhaps deserved, something perhaps that could not be helped. But to have hope plastered over my heart like a target to be trodden on—I cannot bear it.”</p><p>“What do you really mean, brother?”</p><p>He did not know. He was breathing heavily. The hart reared its head, shook itself, then dipped its neck a final time towards him before jumping off and speeding past. As it left, its wings unfurled and Valjean’s eyes widened, watching as it spiraled into the treetops, higher and high, out of sight. He looked at Myriel, and suddenly noticed a young doe sitting at the Bishop’s feet. His mouth opened and shut, and the wind whipped sudden clarity into his eyes.</p><p>“Cosette was not the deer,” Valjean said. Myriel’s eyes were twinkling again, like many stars and if he could just pinpoint a constellation— but he did not know them well enough. Nonetheless he traced between the lights—</p><p>“Cosette was the path.”</p><p>“Cling to Hope, above all. And pursue,” said Myriel.</p><p>“But I have <em>tried</em>, Father.”</p><p>“You pursue as if your end is to slay the beast.”</p><p>“That is not—that is to say—no. It is not.”</p><p>“Then it must not be so.” The last words are caught up in the wind, and the cabin was whipped away along with Myriel. Only the doe and the many candles remained. The lights floated up in the sudden stillness, flickering into Orion. Yes. He recognized the hunter’s belt.</p><p>He felt something nudging against his knuckles and looked down. It was the doe, gently nestling its face against his hand. Its nose was the softest felt. But Valjean could only think of the hart.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Every wise man's son doth know</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Though they still saw each other in the streets in passing—with increased frequency without a known architect—Javert supposed to himself that it was better that Fauchelevent had become absent on the days he called at the Rue Plumet house. This had been one such day, as Javert left the company of the young Mme. Pontmercy, and was in the midst of sidestepping a debate her husband was failingly trying to engage him with. </p><p>Javert did not glance upwards as he passed the stairwell leading to what could only be the bedrooms, nor behind him towards the kitchen door left ajar, for Javert’s eyes did not seek Fauchelevent’s shape. This, he told himself, as Marius showed him to the door, finally having left off the conversation about the degree of annoyance one should feel when encountering the irregularities of English versus French versus German (and regional variances, monsieur!). Javert was able to deliver a polite farewell to the boy, his eyes not straying further down the corridor. The door closed behind him.</p><p>Soon enough, he found himself walking through the garden and out the property’s gate as steadily as he had arrived, hat and gloves fully donned. He had, however, failed to prevent a backward glance at the house and the half shuttered windows of the second floor.   </p><p>The air was brisk, and Javert’s pace soon matched it. He spent a by now customary quarter of an hour at Father Zacharie’s chapel, and only saw the priest emerging from a side door as he stepped out through the main entrance. He nodded the brim of his hat to the priest, and moved on.</p><p>One moment, Javert was upright, feet careful, cane steady. The next, his back was digging painfully into dirt and cobbles, and he was clutching some creature which squirmed and pushed against his stomach. The sound of carriage wheels tore away down the street. An echo of a scream might have punctuated to his left, but that was swallowed into the noise of sellers' carts and footfalls and conversation.</p><p>His cane had clattered into a ditch, and he spied it out of the corner of his eye, out of reach but unbroken. His hat had disappeared. The little bundle at his chest had begun trying to knee him.</p><p>“Gerroff!”</p><p>It squirmed some more, making Javert hold on even tighter.</p><p>“Gerroff, get off!” Small fists pummelled at his chest. A large cap bumped against his chin and underneath it came a little voice again. “Off!” Javert gripped the back of a small coat, and pulled back as he heaved up to a sitting position with his other hand. If the coat was small, its owner was even smaller, for the sleeves showed the coat to be two sizes too big. The boy in it was scruffy. Dirt smudged across his face and the matted strands of brown that made up his fringe were the colour of wet sand. He scrabbled at Javert as he was lifted up, and again as he slipped from where he sat half-straddled across Javert. He barely weighed a thing: an angrily fluttering leaf.</p><p>“It wasn’t my fault those horses came down that way,” said the boy as he twisted in Javert’s grasp. “And it wasn’t my fault those apples were spilled, and I was just crossing the street.” There were some apples fallen by the roadside, now mucked and bruised. Javert looked at them, having not noticed them before the boy had spoken. A small cart stood near, with more apples piled atop it. As Javert scanned the edge of the cart he felt an answering scrape at the heel of his palm. No, it had not been the boy who had rocked the cart. The boy, indeed at no fault, was squirming.</p><p>“Stop moving,” said Javert. The noise of wheels and footsteps and mutters whisked about him, but Javert did not bother raising his voice.</p><p>A spiteful, helpless, tiny one answered him. “No.”</p><p>“I will not hurt you. Stop.” He manoeuvred himself to stand, keeping his hold on the boy, but now at arm’s length. With his feet on the ground the boy began trying to reach behind him for Javert’s hand, but not succeeding.</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Now.” Gripping tighter, Javert pulled at the coat till the boy’s armpits were caught at the start of the sleeves. The boy still tried to shift, though his hands now hung stuck out at his sides, unable to move more than a few inches back and forth. When he was unsuccessful, he sent Javert a glare.</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Is all you’re going to say ‘no’?”</p><p>The boy stilled, and the edge of his cap bobbed up as he raised his head to look at Javert.</p><p>“No?”</p><p>The crease in Javert’s brow deepened.</p><p>“And what’s your name?”</p><p>“’Tienne,” replied the boy promptly. Javert pursed his lips, and the boy frowned back at him. “Ét--tienne,” said the boy slowly. Then, “’Tienne.”</p><p>“Étienne,” said Javert, then stared again at the cap on Étienne’s head. It was a dark grey, and too familiar. He released the boy, and snatched up the cap, turning it over in his hand.</p><p>“What is this?”</p><p>“Hey, give that back!” Étienne’s hand reached up at Javert’s, but the cap was held out of reach. Javert felt within the cap’s inner fold, locating the tell-tale stitches he himself had put there.</p><p>“This is mine,” said Javert. The cloth did not crumple in here as it did along the rest of the sides, and there was still paper within it.</p><p>“Is not. I found that fair and square.”</p><p>Javert looked down at Étienne, fingers still reaching into the cap. “Where?” he asked.</p><p>“At the old Café Musai—no, I don’t need to tell you,” said Étienne. He crossed his arms. “Why should I tell you? Give that back now, you’re going to rip it!” Javert had stopped teasing at the hidden pocket at the mention of the café. His eyes shuttered.</p><p>“Did you know a Gavroche?”</p><p>“Yeah I—” Étienne faltered. “He’s dead.”</p><p>Javert nodded at this. Étienne’s head bobbed in tandem.</p><p>“I’ve had friends die before. People die,” continued Étienne, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. He kicked at the ground for a moment, and then his head shot sharply up.</p><p>“How do you know a Gavr—wait.” Étienne squinted. “I know you. You’re the old Inspector.”</p><p>“Not an Inspector.” The phrase flowed smoothly now, it being true.</p><p>“Yeah, uh huh,” the boy’s cheeks bobbed up and down like two apples on string. “Gav’ said that too. Said y’were a—ah—” cheeks scrunched as the boy tried out the word. “A com-mi-ssaire. But ‘Inspector’ sounds dirtier, he said. Heard that’s what y’were before. Y’ain’t all that shiny just wi’ a new name. In-spect-tor Javert.”</p><p>Javert blinked.</p><p>“Now give that back.”</p><p>“It’s mine,” replied Javert, and slid his finger through the fold finally, loosening out the paper within. It was blank, save for a scrawled inscription simply saying “Javert”. He held it out to the boy. “Here. Proof.”</p><p>Étienne’s mouth pursed into an upturned V. He was not afraid of this man, Inspector or not. “Shoulda’ taken better care of it then.”</p><p>Javert almost chuckled. Instead, he half bared his teeth, and fished in his pocket for the piece of lead he knew was there, as well as a blank square of paper. He considered the child, noticed the way his hand continually returned to pat at his jacket, where the cloth lumped over something that might have been an apple, or half a loaf. Bread. Javert pursed his lips.</p><p>“If you want, I’ll sell you the cap,” said Étienne, when Javert had paused in thought a second too long. Javert shook his head, and straightened his back and knees further.</p><p>“I’ll let you keep my cap, boy,” he said, “And I’ll pay you to run a message for me. You run messages before?”</p><p>“Uh huh.”</p><p>Javert wrote a message, paused, then wrote the address on another corner. He held it out to Étienne. “You know where that is?”</p><p>“Can’t read.”</p><p>Javert muttered something and glanced askance heavenward. He blew at the hair falling over his face as he tapped the paper against the flat of his wrist, once, twice, thrice. Before the fourth tap, he stopped himself and slipped the paper back into its pocket, then held the cap out to the boy. When Etienne gripped it Javert did not let go, and instead reached into another pocket, drawing out three sous. He placed them in the cap. The paper emerged again and joined the sous.</p><p>“At your destination you will be paid further.”</p><p>He gave directions to a certain house located at Rue Plumet, the vines growing as such, the gate of such and such a design, and had Étienne repeat them twice back before releasing the cap. Étienne plopped the cap on his head, but not before the boy had tossed his head to the side, shifting his fringe in a gesture Javert had once seen, perhaps, in a mirror or a dirtied window’s reflection when he had been that age.</p><p>“See ya ‘round, Inspector. Thanks for the save.”</p><p>He had no time to correct the gamin again.</p><p>It was some time before he thought to retrieve his cane. The hat was a lost cause.</p><p>--</p><p>By the time Javert reached his street a dull throb had settled in his left calf and thigh. His cane struck the ground at an uneven pace. The edge of his knuckles itched, as did the stinging from his palms. He hunched into the collar of his coat, and his fringe was plastered against his eyebrows and temples. As he hobbled towards the tenement entrance, a cab drew up beside it, and a man stepped out.</p><p>The man had on a top hat, under which a shock of grey-white curls fell across his forehead. The grey coat the man wore, with one button and a pocket flap askew, betrayed the haste with which he had put it on. Already, as he reached the entrance, he was pulling off his gloves with his teeth, the coat’s cloth crushed and stretched over broad shoulders with his movements. Javert slowed almost to a stop as he moved closer to the man, till he was but a step away.</p><p>So it was that when Fauchelevent turned –aware at once too late and too soon that Javert had stepped up to him—a glove dangled lightly over his chin as his eyes met Javert’s thinned mouth. Fauchelevent’s teeth, clenched over the top of the glove’s last finger, moved a fraction closer together as he startled. He made a noise, muffled though it was by the glove, and frowned. He removed his hat, his mouth fell agape, and the glove plopped onto the brim.</p><p>The muffled noise from before now moulded itself properly into a word: “Javert.” It sounded crumpled, and Fauchelevent ran his tongue over his bottom lip as if to iron it smooth.</p><p>Javert did not speak, only nodded. After throwing a glance towards Fauchelevent’s hands (they fumbled towards their owner’s coat pockets), he half-limped towards the door, pressing his lips together. His legs were tired, and the burn in his elbows had turned into a grey tightness. Stiffly, he lifted his feet past the threshold, and took hold of the banister as he climbed the first steps.</p><p>“Javert,” he heard call after him. The tip-tap of hurried feet followed, turning into light thuds as Fauchelevent entered the building.</p><p>“Are you alright?” came Fauchelevent’s voice behind him.</p><p>This time, Javert replied. “I assume you paid the boy for his pains.” Javert had surmised that assuredly, the boy was being cared for that instant. Javert had recognised the slightly unsteady and too-light feet of the boy, the sort that was not easily solved by a single sodden roll hid in a jacket. Javert had recognised this much, and knew that at least one, if not two at Rue Plumet would recognise the same.</p><p>An exasperated noise issued from Fauchelevent. “Yes, he is—no, that is not—that is, but what of yourself?”</p><p>“As you can see, I am not harmed.” Yet here Javert stumbled against a step, and heard a sound behind him of sole slapping against wood as if Fauchelevent had leapt forwards, but no fingers brushed against Javert’s elbow. Nevertheless, Javert held his arm closer to his body, more delicately than he intended.</p><p>“Right,” he heard Fauchelevent say. “Right. It is so.”</p><p>“It is so,” Javert repeated. As he turned the corner he saw Fauchelevent a number of steps down from him. The other man had paused and was looking up at Javert, at the crook of his arm, but began ascending again when Javert did not stop. Fauchelevent’s steps were more hurried this time.</p><p>“But I don’t understand. Javert—Javert will you stop for a moment?”</p><p>“You annoy me,” Javert muttered into raised lapels, his chin lowered as it was within his greatcoat collar. He moved up the stairs, cringing against the added ache that pulsed through his leg. The bottom of his cane clattered against a step, and he frowned at it accusingly. In the time it took to lift it properly, Fauchelevent had caught up with him, and was now just an arm’s length away.</p><p>A breath, really.</p><p>“Why did you send him to me—us?” So close to his ear; so loud in the empty stairwell, and despite the question sounded so final that Javert paused mid-step. He lowered his foot till both stood on the same stair, and he studied the cracks in the wood at his feet.</p><p>“I could not help him.”</p><p>“Don’t be mad, you saved his life.”</p><p>“I prevented him being run over. And after that, what further use? I would have been in no position to prevent further harm—”</p><p>“You sent him to us.”</p><p>They had reached the top of the stairs, and Javert gripped the banister, looking down the stairwell, not quite at Fauchelevent, more a space near Fauchelevent’s shoes.</p><p>“You should go back to him,” said Javert. “No doubt—”</p><p>“I do not care about the boy. I care about—”</p><p>“A lie. You care too easily. He will be your favourite now.”</p><p>“Why not direct him to a church? Why Rue Plumet?”</p><p>With deliberate slowness, Javert set the cane against the railing. The staircase below him was swirling. With a calm so heavy it was almost pained, he placed his now free hand on the banister, such that both now gripped it, held very close together. Distantly, he thought the pose reminiscent of accused men in their boxes at court. He wet his lips, but could not do the same for his throat, which felt sticky and rough. He found himself unable to answer Fauchelevent. In that silence came another question.</p><p>“You avoid me?”</p><p>The room jerked sharply. Somewhere low in Javert’s chest came the words, “<em>I</em> avoid <em>you</em>?”. He barely heard himself say it; was not sure if he had. He was not sure if Fauchelevent had heard. From the corner of his eye he could see that Fauchelevent too, had neared, though instead of gripping the banister, Fauchelevent straightened his fingers to press their tips against the wood. The angle of the wrist and sleeve suggested that Fauchelevent was facing him.</p><p>Fauchelevent’s voice started again, distant at first. “And yet you addressed it to M. Fauchelevent. To—to me.” The last word came haltingly.</p><p>When Javert did not reply, Fauchelevent drew himself further up. A forceful sigh issued from him before he spoke again: the words tumbling, abrupt.</p><p>“Why that message?”</p><p>Fauchelevent’s head shook in two sweeps to the left and to the right, and his hand moved along the wooden rail towards Javert’s. It stopped an inch before they would have touched. Fauchelevent pushed gingerly at the wood, lifting his hand with each press. As he did so, he spoke. Javert found himself watching as the fingers raised themselves, pressed down, lifted, lowered again with each phrase, and how they faltered when the stops melded into a question.</p><p>“‘He knew Gavroche’, you wrote further. ‘Perhaps M. Pontmercy might employ him in some manner. He cannot read, but if he has found you then he follows directions well enough.’ You wrote that. Why?”</p><p>It took more than a moment for Javert to find what he would say, could say.</p><p>“The family at Rue Plumet, from my observation,” said Javert, watching Fauchelevent’s fingers twitch, “can do for the boy what I cannot, and others would not.” Javert had observed this much, and if theirs was a world of generosity whose rules he could not keep up with, all the better to send Étienne to those more capable of navigating it. Their hearth was always warm, while Javert’s was ashy and thick with dust.</p><p>“Now monsieur, if you would.” He took up his cane and turned towards the door while keeping his back to Fauchelevent.</p><p>Behind him, Fauchelevent shifted.</p><p>“You knew I would come here.” Hushed and low. Too low. Too dangerous.</p><p>Javert kept his head very still, and reached to unlock the door. The muscles about his jaw tightened as he turned the key.</p><p>“I have seen you,” said Javert, his eyes directed to the door, “pacing around the streets at even-times, yonder.” He twisted the doorknob, and stopped himself from flinging the door open. “Am I Jericho, that you besiege me?”</p><p>“I have seen you,” said Fauchelevent, “Your shadow at the window.” Javert had pushed the door open just wide enough to shrug through, and he had, but for the round of a shoulder which now remained exposed to the corridor. Fauchelevent’s hand had reached that shoulder. All Javert needed was to slip further through and close the door. He found that he could not.</p><p>“I have seen you,” continued Fauchelevent, “pacing along Rue Plumet after you have quit my daughter’s residence. I have seen you look up.”</p><p>“Your windows,” replied Javert, “Were too shadowed, I could not observe who was within.”</p><p>“You force my hand,” said Fauchelevent. “Tell me that is why you sent the message.”</p><p>They both stood now within the flat, Fauchelevent having grasped Javert’s elbow, and Javert moving only inward, leaving the corridor, had led them into the small antechamber. Javert’s vision had narrowed, and he saw the opening to the inner rooms as with feathered edges. A bulk moved past his sight, and he heard the door click shut. A low sound, almost wounded, issued through the space. It was not till two hands shook the sound loose from his chest that Javert realised it came from him.</p><p>“You besiege me,” said Javert, staring at Fauchelevent, his hands still occupied with keys and cane and—“M. Fauchelevent—”</p><p>Fauchelevent had brought his face close. No. That would not do. At this distance, at this lack thereof, it was hard to call him Fauchelevent still. Javert looked away, wrenching his hands about his cane. Fauchelevent moved no closer, but also moved no farther away.</p><p>To the air between them, Fauchelevent whispered, “You force me to pursue you.”</p><p>“I see how it is,” said Javert, unseeing, for the room had spun and Fauchelevent’s face swam in and out of view. Javert could hear the other man’s panting breath, loud as it was, too harsh and too loud in the hallway. “But then, perhaps, I was prey from the start.” He waved his hand absently, as if seeking to tether thoughts to speech.</p><p>“Prey to,” said Javert, “your Madeleine.” His mayor. The cane fell to the floor, rolling beside their feet, but Javert did not twist away. He lowered his chin further into himself till it touched his chest. Fauchelevent only gripped him tighter.</p><p>Javert was muttering into his collar, he was— “Release me—no, no, you did that already. You had me caught, you—you cut the ropes.”</p><p>He ran his hand roughly at the join of his neck at the memory, feeling the friction burn in his thumb’s wake as he swallowed. His wrist bumped against Fauchelevent’s arm. Another swallow. “You put me under a sentence: a life sentence. As good, monsieur, as good as death. Do you not understand?” He tossed his chin to the side, working against the pull of what seemed like rope between his teeth. “You looped a chain about my neck, an anchor on the other end. What would you have me do?”</p><p>“What you will,” came the low answer, and Javert had to strain to hear.</p><p> “I cannot hear you.”</p><p>“What you will,” repeated, closer this time, tickling at Javert’s lips.</p><p>“What I will?” echoed Javert, voice hushing just as low. “What I will? Why, when I was bent to <em>your</em> will then—even now I am not quit of these bonds—”</p><p>He lifted his gaze to Fauchelevent’s chest, saw how it rose and fell fleetingly. A choked murmur brushed against his jaw. Javert fancied it held a question.</p><p>“You do not ask. You plead in a voice that belies command. You take—you took— Valjea—monsieur.” He took three short breaths. “And I gave.” He raised his eyes to Fauchelevent’s face. There was not enough in him to be breathless. The eyes shielded under Fauchelevent’s brows were pained.</p><p>“I know. I am sorry.”</p><p>Laughter coughed its way out of Javert.</p><p>“Sorry? What for? Could you give back—could you—” his speech choked him. He shook his head.  A whisper grated through his throat, pitching higher till it broke. “Could you give me back my le Maire?” It sounded pathetic, yet Fauchelevent looked as if the utterance was a knife between his ribs. Javert could no longer dam his words in.</p><p>“He said—he said he would exorcise Jean Valjean.” At the name, Fauchelevent sucked in a breath.</p><p>“He was to me, everything. In the end, he is lost. He is drowned. He drags me with him.” At that, a small noise shuddered within Fauchelevent. It caused Javert, unwittingly, to raise a hand between them and rest his hand over Fauchelevent’s breastbone. His fingers pushed at the cloth there, tracing where it bunched and wrinkled.</p><p>“And so, monsieur, could you give me back Madeleine?” His head inched to the side, and it was his turn to speak into the other man’s jaw.  </p><p>“Give him to me. Make me forget that I looked in his face and saw a convict’s, and that I could—that I would—that I would have given myself to that man too.” His fringe was falling against Fauchelevent’s cheek. Javert’s lids beat against the warmth. The hands fell away from his shoulders, and Fauchelevent made to move his head back. Javert found purchase on the cloth of Fauchelevent’s shirt, and held fast. Fauchelevent’s pulse tapped at his knuckles, caught as he was.</p><p>Javert shook his head.</p><p>“And yet, no. Not him, you understand. Someone I imagined he could be. Had been.” He thought of Toulon; the sea's stink which soared up the ramparts. He thought back to the Seine, so black, so ugly, as he had known himself to be. “There are rivers I cannot ford, waters I cannot tread.” He shook his head again.</p><p>“I am not Madeleine,” said the man in front of him.</p><p>A pause, but Javert conceded. “No. No, you are not.”</p><p>“But I am not that man you term convict either. God help me, I am not. I am—”</p><p>“Fauchelevent.”</p><p>“No.” said Fauchelevent. “No, no. But I am—I am—” his voice faded with a tremor, and his hand floundered at his side, seeking for words. He glanced at the floor, bit his lip, looked back to Javert again. “Valjean,” he said, just barely. “I am Valjean made anew.”</p><p>Valjean. Something was shaking in Fauchelevent’s brow. Something trembled in his eyes: watery, like a deer’s. But their positions were reversed. Javert the hound was the hunted. And the hart, the hart drove steadily on, beyond the chase, beyond the past that cracked like a whip at Javert’s heels. And what of it? Javert had never led the chase; had just been dragged along the circuit, baying and baying as he had been taught.  </p><p>“And still, you do not tell me why,” murmured Javert now, half to his shirt, half to Fauchelevent’s. He shut his eyes. “Why did Madeleine?” The name was sour at the edges of his tongue, and he pressed it to the roof of his mouth. “Why did you?” At the last word his voice cracked. He opened his eyes.</p><p>Fauchelevent’s lips trembled, and the shaking passed into his next words. “I told you, then. Do you remember? I fell, I said. I said—I did not expect—I tried so.” Fauchelevent breathed in, catching on a sigh. “I tried.”</p><p>“You lied.”</p><p>“Yes. Yes. I sought to divert you: from who I was. But then—then—and then I fell.”</p><p>Ordinary men fell, but Madeleine had been no ordinary man. “I fell, Javert. That was not a lie. The bud of truth among the trappings—” which trapped, yes, as they did. “Your current pulled me in. I did not expect—I tried—I fell.” <em>For you</em>. The words went unspoken.</p><p>“Fell? No—no,” said Javert. “You do not fall. No,” he said. Javert’s hair hung limp against his brows. His lips parted for a gasp, a short punctuation, then words.</p><p>“No. No. Valjean.” The name flowed through Javert’s throat, and he tasted it, licking his lips. “Valjean,” he said again. He swallowed, and as he did, the strangest fissure appeared above his jaw: a sickly sort of smile. “Jean Valjean,” he said, and said again, watching as the features of the man before him shifted and rippled, the illusion of Fauchelevent shimmering away, leaving behind just—just a man, like any other; like no other.  </p><p>This was that man at the barricades, with the same eyes and the same smile of a man who once said <em>Stay </em>and drew Javert into his arms one night, and cleaned him as if he were a new-born, many winters ago.</p><p>“Valjean,” he said a fifth time, and ran his tongue across the bottom of his teeth where the name seemed stuck fast. He could no longer feel his legs, only the wall at his back and the cloth in his grip. His hand had wound its way into the cravat of the man before him. Underneath it, skin breathed. In front of him, the eyes grew large. Ah.</p><p>Yes.</p><p>Valjean.</p><p>“You do not fall. You dive.” And with those words; with that strange, terrible truth, he crushed their lips together.</p>
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<a name="section0013"><h2>13. My stars shine darkly over me</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Content in this chapter brings the overall rating of the work to M.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They crumpled towards the floor.</p><p>“Let me,” said Valjean, when he managed to raise his head to the air, hands tangled about Javert’s arms. Javert’s answering laughter was a short bark. Valjean could see where his shirt stuck to his neck, already sticky with perspiration. Valjean’s pulse seemed a match to the tremors in the line of Javert’s back. Their teeth sparred: jarring, knocking their breaths out again and again. Air funnelled past opposing mouths and into the other, too little, too much, choking. It overwhelmed. It was not enough.</p><p>Javert’s stick lay forgotten.</p><p>They made their way to the bed, knocking against table legs and door posts. All twisted cloth and freshly scuffed boots, they fell in a jagged, many limbed heap, lips red and flush against skin; against lip; against the small puffs of air that they managed to exhale against the other.</p><p>“Let me,” intoned Javert, “Go.” Both his hands had found purchase on the mattress, and Javert heaved himself up, only just. Half his torso leaned on the bed, the other half pressed against Valjean’s chest. His head hung just over Valjean’s, his hair curtaining the sides of both their faces. Within this space, his breath landed on Valjean’s eyebrows, forehead, eyelids, a gentle violence which quaked a gasp from Valjean. Their breaths mingled, flit through that curtain; filled the room. Then Valjean stilled his.</p><p>With that pause, Valjean unstuck the fingers of one hand from where they clutched Javert’s shoulder, and lowered them, entering the folds of the greatcoat, lower still, till his thumb touched the hollow of Javert’s thigh. The other man’s hips buckled but slightly. Valjean saw that Javert’s teeth were bared, and felt the breath now whistling through to land in flutters on his skin. Through this, Javert’s gaze did not unpin itself from Valjean’s.</p><p>“I will not,” said Valjean, voice hoarse. “I will not let thee go until you bless me.” His smile trembled as he looked full at Javert.</p><p>Javert’s laugh dislodged itself, his next words wild. “And shall we wrestle?”</p><p>“Till the break of dawn.” On this salient point, Valjean canted his hips, turned and brought Javert with him on their sides. Another laugh was knocked from Javert at this, silent this time, only to be felt by Valjean. Valjean’s next words were a murmur, spoken into the cloth around Javert’s neck. “Do not keep yourself from me.”</p><p>Even as he uttered that plea, Valjean disentangled his other arm from where it levered across Javert’s shoulder and between their chests. He moved it to join its brother, sliding it over planes of cloth, catching only slightly on the cold metal of a button. With both hands now, he pressed against the insides of Javert’s thighs, inching to the knees, feeling the fabric tighten in his wake, feeling the warmth rise through his palms. He saw Javert shift—just so—then Javert’s legs fell spread. Into this harbour Valjean drew himself in, jaw nuzzling, lips pressing on rough threads under which heated skin breathed.</p><p>“Keep me,” muttered Javert, hands in fists beside him, “Keep me from myself.” Javert had stopped shifting, and lay still on his back, head raised. His eyes wandered between the strands of hair that clung to the hull of his forehead. His throat bobbed as Valjean’s gaze centred on it, as Valjean’s palms steered against his hips.</p><p>“You keep yourself from me,” returned Valjean with hands crept to the hem of Javert’s already untucked shirt. Skirting underneath, he sucked in a breath as his fingers met damp skin, and circled slowly higher. A whine issued through the room, and Valjean was not certain it was Javert’s. He called Javert’s name. The rise and fall of Javert’s stomach answered him, tense and feverish. A gasp sounded as Valjean reached Javert’s ribs, and again as his fingers moved higher, across chest, across—here, yes—there, just—a flick, an answering grunt. A press, a stifled huff in tow. Another. Yes. Yes. Valjean drew in air, and let both hands dip downwards to anchor Javert’s waistband.</p><p>“So, keep me—” said Javert again, his throat tight, “—from myself.” Now breathless, his head fell back.</p><p>Valjean did not catch Javert’s meaning; reeled in only his body.</p><p>--</p><p>This was a night like various nights before it. Rain pattered outside against shutters, little droplets hushing into sighs as they trickled down walls and into rivulets through the cobbles.</p><p>Tonight, they were once again in Javert’s bed, but no longer in the kitchenette. Javert had acquiesced to opening the bedroom but five days earlier, and the bed within it could occupy them both. His visits to Rue Plumet had increased in frequency. Étienne had accepted a room there, but this was no impediment to Javert’s visits. On the contrary, Cosette had begun teaching the boy his letters, and Étienne would show his progress to any audience, including the stoic not-Inspector.</p><p>To keep things even, Valjean now visited Javert too.</p><p>The rain continued, till its rhythm drowned out all else, including the heartbeat of the man beside Valjean. He did not try to edge closer in an attempt to hear it, for it would not do to startle Javert. Yet he marvelled at how the man’s features, though his cheekbones stood sharper than before, were still softened by the hair which now framed his face, and were softened further by the lax, small O of his mouth when asleep. Valjean marvelled, till eventually the whole visage blurred with the room and Valjean himself fell to slumber.</p><p>But sleep, ah, surely that was easy now.</p><p><em>Keep me</em>.</p><p>Valjean started awake, fingers denting the empty pillow beside him. The room was dark but for patches of moonlight. A chill had settled over his skin, and he drew his hands in to rub at his arms as he looked around: the guttered fire, then the chair beside the bed.</p><p>It was occupied.</p><p>“What are you doing?”</p><p>The shadow Valjean addressed shifted, causing pale light to land on a square of beard. The rest of that figure stayed a mulish black. The chair he sat in was angled towards the bed. A flicker caught in the space below his brow as he tilted his head at Valjean. If his jaw worked before he spoke, Valjean did not see it.</p><p>“What think you, that I do?”</p><p>“You answer a question with a question, Javert.”</p><p>Silence was Javert’s next reply. The glimmer in Javert’s eyes smoked out, reappeared, vanished again, and when they emerged a final time, they had shifted their place, though there had been no scrape of chair legs against the floor. Javert’s head was turned away towards the door. Valjean rubbed at his temple, moving to sit up further in the bed. As he did so, he saw the thin trail of smoke as it wound upwards from a candle on the bedside table. It was not lit, and the air around it seemed to recoil from Valjean. He thought better than to reach towards it, thought better than to reach towards Javert, choosing instead to fiddle with the bedspread. He heard the sound of crinkling paper.</p><p>“You were reading?”</p><p>“I was sitting.”</p><p>The slip of paper in Javert’s hand crackled further.</p><p>It had not been the first time he had woken like this to Javert in the past week. It had been so, that night at Javert’s abode (yes, it was not so strange a thought that it was Javert’s now), when Valjean woke in the cot to find Javert leaning against the kitchen fireplace’s mantel. As it was then, Javert’s locks of hair did much to hide his face.</p><p>“Then sit there no longer, Javert,” Valjean murmured. “It is cold.”</p><p>“It is not quite so.” But Javert’s hands, one closing about his waist, the other across an arm, spoke otherwise.</p><p>Valjean angled his head curiously at the paper, still in Javert’s lap.</p><p>“And what is that?”</p><p>Javert’s fingers jumped against his sleeve, stilled, pressed deeper. “It is nothing.” The paper was folded hastily, and tucked away in Javert’s pocket. It was then that Valjean noticed the man was fully clothed, Javert’s coat slung over a chair, both boots still on.</p><p>“You were out?”</p><p>“A walk, merely.”</p><p>“I did not hear you leave.”</p><p>“No matter.”</p><p>“Then change and come back to bed, Javert.” He intended his words to soothe—who: himself or Javert, he was not sure of— but an unnatural thump began to sound under his throat, causing his words to jump instead.</p><p>On hearing this, Javert’s eyes returned to Valjean, but instead of undressing for bed, proceeded to the fireplace. Valjean heard some ruffling, then a match’s strike echoed in the room, and soon the crackle of lit wood followed.</p><p>Javert knelt, staring at the flames, an almost absent look to the crags above his brows. So, when his face like a hot stone turned to Valjean, Valjean found his tongue stuck fast to the roof of his mouth.  </p><p>“I would see you, tonight, Jean Valjean.”</p><p>“Pardon?”</p><p>Javert rose. “Your shirt,” he said.</p><p>“What of it?” asked Valjean. His hand had risen to grip loosely about the collar.</p><p>“Let me know you, tonight, Jean Valjean.”</p><p>Javert began removing his own clothes, slowly, methodically, and yet in the flickering, brightening light Valjean could see the man’s hands shiver. The boots thudded to the floor, followed by the hush of trousers and inner garments. There was a look in Javert’s eyes that Valjean could not name: a sort of fear, a sort of resignation, which grew closer and closer till cold fingers pulled Valjean’s own away from his chest and towards the bed.</p><p>Thus unmoored, Valjean uttered, “You have seen me before.”</p><p>“Not in light,” returned Javert. “Not in full.” Javert wet his lips. “A Mayor once dared me to imagine his back riddled with scars.” He made as if to speak further, but fell silent, jaw working, head half turning to where his clothes lay folded near the fire. Valjean understood his meaning.</p><p>“If you should wish it,” whispered Valjean. He relaxed his hold on the bed sheets, and turned his palms face up, open.</p><p>Fingers, quickly heating on contact, unlaced Valjean’s shirt, pushing it open to expose Valjean’s chest. Javert’s mouth leaned to the hollow of Valjean’s throat, kissed it, and in that fashion moved towards the clavicle’s centre. Finding a roughened line of skin just at the bone, he paused, then his tongue darted out to trace the spot. Once, twice, three times, four, till Valjean gasped his name. Javert’s lips mouthed “more”, then “monsieur”, and finally “please”, even as his hands travelled below to bunch and lift cloth, temporarily obscuring Valjean’s vision as his whole shirt was removed.</p><p>“Show me, Jean Valjean,” said Javert. He buried his nose under Valjean’s jaw, teasing upwards towards the space underneath Valjean’s ear till a yearning growl issued. “Show me” said Javert again, deeper this time, turning Valjean’s shoulder to lay him on his stomach. Valjean moved with the tide of Javert’s hands, and arms, and body, and felt the other man settle close to him.</p><p>Javert’s fingertips hovered above Valjean, the criss-cross of scars etching shadows in the firelight. He touched one, then another, in no particular order, downwards, downwards, till he reached Valjean’s thighs, uncovering the sheets as he went. Then he went back up, but this time—oh. Valjean felt warmth and wetness as fingers and tongue travelled across his back, but they did not follow the map already on them. No, Javert was creating new paths, dipping over and between lines as if they had no consequence. It was as if Valjean too, was to learn the landscape anew. Where Javert went, channels of heat followed: flames which licked with no pain. No pain at all, and yet it burned so.</p><p>Javert was mouthing into his skin, but Valjean could not make out the words.</p><p>“What are you saying, Javert?” he called softly.</p><p>Javert shook his head in reply and did not speak further. He did not speak even as his hand reached between Valjean’s legs, the older man already half hard. He did not speak when he pushed his nose into the dip of Valjean’s spine, nor when Valjean spent himself, only holding Valjean closer, closer, till Valjean gasped when Javert separated them and allowed the night air to move between their bodies, planting lips on Valjean’s shoulder before leaving the bed entirely. Javert was not long gone, for he returned soon after with a warmed, damp cloth, moving gently.</p><p>Valjean could not navigate Javert’s face, which held no answer, just simple concentration.</p><p>His own eyes questioning, Valjean spoke. “And have you seen me?”</p><p>“I do see you, Jean Valjean.” The words came clear, almost too clear, the room suddenly made of glass. Valjean swallowed. Javert had stilled, and stood as a mute post.  </p><p>“Enough,” said Valjean. “Sleep, Javert.” Reaching for the cloth, he took it from Javert’s grip: limp anyway, and said, “Come, Javert. To bed.”</p><p>“I am already here.” The sullen tone brought a smile back to Valjean’s face. He threw back his head and laughed, embracing Javert, pulling him down to meet him. Kissing Javert, he let his smile mould against Javert’s teeth before releasing him. Javert answered with a grunt, but acquiesced, and lay beside Valjean. They remained that way for a few minutes, before Valjean felt sleep lapping at him again. Just before sleep could encase him, he remembered the piece of paper.</p><p>“What was in that note?” he half yawned.</p><p>It was only a full minute later did Javert reply, “The importance of shoes, and socks, and chairs.” Half a minute more, then:</p><p>“I have been summoned,” said Javert. He let a sigh flow from him. “A week past, I was notified. I am to give my answer tomorrow: if I am agreeable to return to duty. As a chief inspector.”</p><p>“Ah,” was Valjean’s response, for lack of any other which suited. Many thoughts and little words found themselves dammed.  </p><p>“Surely,” said Javert. “I must obey.”</p><p>“I see,” said Valjean, now fully roused.</p><p>“Yet, sleep,” said Javert, and turned on his side to slumber. Valjean did not follow suit immediately.</p><p>At first light, Javert was already dressed when Valjean awoke, tending to the fire. “You awake,” said Javert. “My appointment is near noon. I must see to some things before then.”</p><p>“Tarry yet,” said Valjean. Javert shook his head, and crossed the space to the bedside. His hand lifted in pause, then reached to stroke a thumb across Valjean’s cheek. It was tender. It was so unlike the rest of Javert standing stonily still in the room.  </p><p>“Farewell, Valjean. I am yet bound to another master.” The issue: what Javert would be bound to do; went unsaid between them.</p><p>“I will be waiting,” answered Valjean. Javert nodded, and left.</p><p>Valjean lay in bed an hour longer, staring at the ceiling, as unease roiled over him. He moved to stand, eventually, before he could sink beneath those waves. He left the flat at the full break of dawn.   </p><p>--</p><p>“M. Javert!” Zacharie’s wave was joyful, if contained, as he called out to Javert. It had been a few weeks since Javert had come by the church. Zacharie had not seen him at Montparnasse Cemetery either in that time. As Zacharie stood near a soon-to-be gravesite, he had spotted Javert walking across the grounds, hands deep in his coat pockets, and a scarf tucked in at the collar. </p><p>“What seek you?” asked Zacharie, as Javert crossed over the small turf to the as yet shallow grave.</p><p>“A walk,” replied Javert. Zacharie chuckled, and looked back to the grave. The grave-digger did not look up from his work, which seemed difficult in January’s chill. The ground was cold, and the shovel did not seem to be making much headway.</p><p>“The funeral is to be this afternoon,” said Zacharie as Javert drew near. “I come to observe the preparations on behalf of the family.” Javert stood beside Zacharie, having offered a perfunctory greeting, now watching, too, the ongoing effort. “Will you be passing through then?” It would not have been the first such time. Javert gave a vague sideways bob of his head in answer.</p><p>The scene could have been called peaceful, had not the digger cried out, clutching at his shoulder, the shovel slipping from his grip.</p><p>“Father. Monsieur,” said the digger, “Forgive me—some strain.” His teeth were clenched, and perspiration dotted the sides of his face, which had suddenly gone both red and pale. “Forgive me—I must find another. I cannot continue.” He wiped at his brow, pursing his lips at the half-dug ground. “Ah, it does not yield today,” he said.</p><p>“Where is the helper?” asked Javert, for he had seen them work in pairs, or threes on occasion.</p><p>“He is sick, monsieur. He has caught cold in this weather.” The reply was still cheerful as the digger rubbed now at his shoulder. A more observant listener would have detected the hits of fret within them. Javert was such a listener, and he considered the man.</p><p>“The other diggers, have you no replacement?” asked Zacharie.</p><p>“They are busy today with the communal grave. I and Henri had been relieved to come here, but Henri, he is sick. I had not thought it would be so difficult. It has not been so cold this past week.”</p><p>The digger shook his head. “There is no helping this ground. I go, Father, to seek a replacement. You should inform the family that the grave might be delayed.” With that, the digger half shrugged on a jacket, the sore arm left out of sleeve, and walked off.</p><p>“Well,” said Zacharie, staring at the barely dug plot. “Except the Lord build—” he murmured, then cut off his words when he noticed Javert looking at him.</p><p>“I have hands, I can work,” said Javert half to Zacharie, half to himself.</p><p>Already, Javert was unbuttoning his coat, laying aside his cane near the headstone of another grave. He took up the shovel, felt the heft and shape of the handle as he turned it in his hands. His face set, he nodded to Zacharie, and plunged the tip into the hard earth. The earth relented, and Javert struck again, and again, and again, his arms moving in arcs that caused the metal to glint as it passed through the air before it hit grass and soil.</p><p>He had dug graves before, in days long gone, when he had still understudied Thierry. Those prisoner transports, with their heat and unclean stench, had inevitably had their share of fatalities. The burials were quick, for the transports carried no supply of rite or ritual. Thierry had not trusted the prisoners with tools, and so the task had fallen to the younger watchers, Javert among them.</p><p>Those movements: this turn of the handle here, that rhythm of foot to shovel; to lift; to air, these came back to Javert. He moved the shovel in shallows, for the frosted ground would not give full way. He knew this, and with heavy patience broke up the frozen soil inch, after inch, after inch.</p><p>Thus, did Javert till the ground, and thus did he labour. In time, the soil grew soft beneath his feet, and his sweat did water it. Thus, began he preparing a bed for the soul that was to lay in it: a proper grave, not the rough cots of dirt he had made in his youth. Javert smote the soil with a beat which steadied itself in his veins. Blood thrummed in his chest, and arms, and calves, and his fingers felt hot as they gripped the handle. Something was softening within him. Something was piercing through the frost—that icy sheet of disconcert that covered him since the day Chabouillet had spoken to him at the coffeehouse of his appointed return to the police.</p><p>By the time the digger had returned with replacements, Javert was about three tenths of the way through.</p><p>“Monsieur!” Exclamations from men a decade younger than him sounded. Others stepped in and took over. Javert was made to move back in the rush.</p><p>Leaning side to side, hands pressing into the back of his hips, Javert surveyed his work and saw that it was—if not good—then satisfactory.</p><p>Javert looked to Zacharie, who had stood beside the whole time, silent. Zacharie smiled at him, nodding, unspeaking, and yet Javert imagined some counsel had passed from the priest’s lips, for now Javert had clarity. He knew now what he would do. He would work, for he had hands. He would till, though the city held no farms. His hands could craft no beautiful thing, but this—this he could make. There was peace in this work. He would enquire at the municipal office on the morrow.</p><p>With this quiet victory held in his chest, Javert left the cemetery, his coat loose about him, his breath free. Yes. This was a reasonable means of recompense, a debt he could pay. In this manner, he could go on.</p><p>He took a cab to the Prefecture, and walked through the halls resolute, pausing only at an annex where he knew a small desk with writing supplies would be. There was little need for flourish, for it would but be a short notice; perfunctory. He signed accordingly at the end, and found means by which to seal the letter.</p><p>Javert continued his way through the building, moving now up a flight of stairs. His feet moved past every alternate step, cane following. Sunlight from the windows ahead streamed, first down his head, then his feet, as he emerged from the stairwell. Thus, with the sun’s benediction, he turned down the corridor, pace increasing. Ahead, he saw Cuif appear round the corner. The inspector called out to Javert.</p><p>“Sir!”</p><p>Javert acknowledged him, but did not flag. On noticing the older man’s haste, Cuif aborted further engagement, and merely raised a hand in salutation. Cuif appeared puzzled. Javert would call on him in the evening, perhaps, if only to apprise him of the reason he had come to call on their chief.</p><p>Soon enough, he was at Chabouillet’s door. He rapped lightly, and the voice within allowed entrance. Javert did so, unhesitating, and strode to Chabouillet’s desk, armed as he was with the small paper. He placed it on Chabouillet’s desk, took off his hat, bowed, and took two steps back, each move executed with equal regularity. </p><p>He noticed then that Chabouillet was already standing. This being unusual, Javert’s head angled itself slightly before righting again.</p><p>“Monsieur,” said Javert.</p><p>Chabouillet looked down at the letter, if distractedly.</p><p>“Ah, Javert, yes. You have come. I had not expected so soon, but all the better. Your answer?”</p><p>“Monsieur, my resignation.”</p><p>Chabouillet waved the words away, as amusement now rose to his cheeks. “Resignation?” asked Chabouillet, “but you are just in time.” He nodded now, coming about his desk, a dogged, small grin appearing. It had been some time since Javert had seen such a look on his superior, signifying some scent of a chase.</p><p>“We have apprehended the man at long last.” Ah, indeed. That explained Cuif’s presence in the hallways.</p><p>“Montparnasse?”</p><p>“We shall need you as witness—” Chabouillet interrupted himself at the name, head tilted in a question. “Montparnasse? No, no, Javert. I speak not of him.”</p><p>“But Cuif—?”</p><p>“Cuif? Yes, he gave me a report, but this matter concerns not him.”</p><p>Chabouillet clapped his hand on Javert’s shoulder.</p><p>“I speak of Jean Valjean.”</p>
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